If you remember, Microsoft enthusiasts Long Zheng, Rafael Rivera, and Chris Walsh stirred up quite the hornets nest back last November when they unleashed “ChevronWP7”, a simple tool (accessed through what turned out to be “a coding error”) that “allow(ed) the sideloading of experimental applications that would otherwise can’t be published to the Marketplace, such as those which access private or native APIs”.
After some discussions with Microsoft, our pals ended up shutting ChevronWP7 down, but as far as we can tell the whole process was fairly amicable, and now they’ll soon be heading to Redmond to further discuss Windows Phone 7 and the “homebrew community”:
As everyone is settling into the new year, we’d like to provide an update on our scheduled face-to-face meeting with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 team next week in Redmond.
We’ll be sharing our perspective on the homebrew potentials of Windows Phone 7 and some of the wider community feedback around the platform.
In addition to our homebrew focus, we will also be pushing for stronger protection of WP7 developer intellectual property (IP) on the platform as we believe both can co-exist on the platform.
The post, on the ChevronWP7 blog/website, goes on to note that while the unlocking tool continues to be used by some, “Microsoft has informed us the “coding error” used in the ChevronWP7 unlocker will no longer work after the next Windows Phone 7 update”.
There are already a number of suggestions for topics of discussion (including the sorry state of a Windows Live Messenger client for Windows Phone 7), so if you have requests, be sure to leave them a comment.