So you want to get in the game, or even make the games?

Here’s a summary of what’s been announced and the impending activities which will come to a head (for the first phase at least) with major revelation sessions at Microsoft’s Mix10 conference starting March 15th 2010.

Microsoft came out of the gate about Windows Phone 7 Series (or WP7 for short) at MWC, for the first time publically showing off the new UI.

Since then Microsoft’s Joe gave a more intimate demo on Microsoft’s Channel9.

Charlie Kindel (a man leading the charge at Microsoft) has indicated that .NET, Silverlight & XNA are key technologies to WP7 development.  I’ve long been aware of the Silverlight angle on mobile device and had some preview access to mobile possibilities, so I can see that this is a great direction.  I hope Microsoft brings out the right caliber (and readiness) of tools that developers need – developer tools (and I don’t mean Blend) have been sorely lacking for Silverlight; it will be April 12th before the first of developer design tools for Silverlight are made available with Visual Studio 2010.

There’s been a video of the Platformer game running on Windows Phone 7, with the notion that someone can create a game with largely shared code which can run on Windows 7, WP7, Xbox & Zune.

At the Game Developer Conference this coming week, Microsoft may well be talking about XNA developer for WP7.

Microsoft has just announced the abstracts for the WP7-related sessions at Mix10 (starting the following week) and  Microsoft Canada’s Joey deVilla has a great summary of them.

It has been indicated that access to the keynote and sessions for Mix10 to not require attendance at Mix.

I’m aiming to live blog the MIX keynotes and follow up on what’s announced about WP7 from the sessions.

Be sure to follow the tweets and blog posts of these guys at Microsoft:

Andre Vrignaud: www.ozymandias.com / @ozymandias

Christian Schormann: electricbeach.org / @cschormann

Shawn Hargreaves: blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar / @shawnhargreaves

Todd Brix: windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone  / @toddbrix

Anand Iyer: www.artificialignorance.net/blog / @ai

Michael Klucher: klucher.com / @mklucher

In Canada keep an eye out here and on the Canadian Developer Connection blog.