You’ve probably heard the rumors during the past weeks, but at the Mix10 Keynote this morning, ScottGu and Co. confirmed all of the leaks about Windows Phone 7 Series !

You can download the tools you need now, including Silverlight and XNA development libraries and a Phone Emulator.

Microsoft has created a stringent list of requirements for hardware manufacturers, which should keep a consistent experience across devices, while keeping competition high among manufacturers (and therefore pricing low!) Back in the day I did some Pocket PC development and it was challenging to make sure your application worked with each device and processor type. Another problem was the different hardware buttons that each device had, and the Key codes that they raised through events. New Windows Phones will have three consistent buttons: Back - Start – Search.

There will also be some great monetization opportunities. First, you can place your applications on the MarketPlace as a pay-for-download product. And in the Keynote, we saw that ads can also be displayed over your app for ad-based revenue.

So what kind of applications will the device handle? There were several sample apps shown but definitely the most hardware intensive was "The Harvest" (this was first shown at the GDC conference last week), which showed a complete 3D dynamic environment.

Needless to say I am very excited about this new Silverlight platform! I will embrace it first for casual games development using Silverlight, and will be sharing my development experiences in future blog posts!