So if you have a developer registered Windows Phone, hopefully by now you have received your invite to update to the trial, beta of Mango, the next build of Windows Phone. If you’re like me you dev unlocked your device to take advantage of homebrew apps like registry editors, file managers etc. As drastic as it is, Rafael Rivera posted something about Mango earlier in the week, that’s a big hit to the Homebrew community in this update.
With the Windows Phone Mango embargo having expired today, I can now mention Mango won’t officially support the deployment of custom applications with the ID_CAP_INTEROPSERVICES capability flag. This undocumented switch was used in WMAppManifest.xml to enable access to a COM-based platform interoperability bridge, between managed and unmanaged code. This bridge powers many homebrew and mobile-operator (MO) applications today.
It becomes really obvious once you go through the prolonged process of updating your handset to the new Mango beta, that all programs taking advantage of this capability are rendered useless, whether installed before or after the update. They will throw up an error if you try to install them after the update. You will also have to Dev unlock your device again after the update, as it relocks the phone. In fact the only homebrew application I had installed on the HD7 that still works is the ChevronWP7 ringtones. Really nice feature that I hadn’t picked up on before was tap to focus and shoot in the camera application, just found it now! [Image from my HTC Mozart, running Mango]
