Microsoft has just made available some resources to help you make your WP 7 applications run more efficiently. It comes with a clear statement of what WP 7 is really all about.

In a recent WP 7 blog  Larry Lieberman, a product manager with the project give a list of resources that can help make your app go faster and generally take the load off the hardware.

Commenting on the difference between WP  7 and the original Windows Mobile operating system the shift of emphasis is also made clear:

"As you've probably read, here and elsewhere, Windows Phone 7 constituted a dramatic shift for Microsoft...

Windows Mobile was really about delivering a completely customizable operating system environment to our OEM and MO partners. As a result, Microsoft could not have a very strong connection to what end users actually received."

The blog then goes on to emphasis the fact that while WP 7 is a Silverlight development environment it is highly optimised for the lower power hardware. You may have a GPU available but the batteries will only last so long.

The first resource aimed at helping you understand the nature of the optimisations is a video interview with Shane Guillet, Test Lead of the Silverlight team.

The video is interesting but the real gem is the white paper on optimising Silverlight which gives lots of detailed discussion of threading, frame rates, caching and so on. You need to read this one!

You can download the white paper at (both now removed):

Creating High Performing Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone. Rohan Thakkar, a PM on the Silverlight team, has also posted the full text of this paper on his blog at: Performance for Silverlight Mobile.

The entire article will be online in the MSDN Library shortly.