Hours after HP announced plans to discontinue its webOS device business in the face of mediocre sales, Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone 7 director Brandon Watson rolled out the red carpet to webOS developers disenfranchised by HP's move. "To Any Published WebOS Devs: We'll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl. free phones, dev tools and training, etc.," Watson tweeted Friday. A follow-up tweet posted Monday morning suggests many developers were quick to capitalize on Watson's invitation: "Email flood begins anew... Closing in on 1K #webOS dev emails," he writes.
Watson's largesse notwithstanding, TechCrunch points out many former webOS developers may struggle in the event they decide to transition to Windows Phone. While many webOS applications are written in HTML and JavaScript, Windows Phone 7 development requires knowledge of C# and the .NET framework.
Microsoft is slated to begin accepting applications optimized for its new Windows Phone 7.1 update later this month. The free Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Beta 2 is available for download here.
For more:
- read this TechCrunch article
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