Today at MIX 2010 we announced Silverlight beta for Nokia S60 phones. Go download the beta from http://silverlight.net/getstarted/devices/symbian/.
Currently the supported platform is S60 5th Edition phones and in particular the 5800 XpressMusic, N97 and N97 mini. It works in-browser and only in the Nokia default web-kit based browser.
Silverlight on S60 uses .NET Compact Framework (NETCF) underneath it. I work in the dev team for the Execution Engine of NETCF and I was involved at the very beginning with getting NETCF to work on the S60 platform.
NETCF is extremely portable (more about that in later posts) and hence we didn’t have a lot of trouble getting it onto S60. We abstract away the platform by coding against a generic platform abstraction layer (PAL), but even then we had some challenges. Getting .NET platform on a non-Windows OS is challenging because so much of our code relies on Windows like functionality (semantics) which might not be available directly on other platforms.
As I was digging through emails I found the following screenshot that I had sent out to the team when I just got NETCF to work on the S60 Emulator…
As you can see the first code to run was a console application and it was not Hello World :). We have come a long way since then as evident from the touch based casual game running on the N97 shown below
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