The Marmalade team were invited to Micrososft's Build event as one of six partners for Windows Phone 8. At the event we announced our upcoming support for Windows Phone 8 and showed off an alpha version of the Marmalade build tools and a demo app running on a Nokia WP8 dev device.

Marmalade's unique feature for WP8 developers is that we will allow them to code graphics in OpenGL ES and deploy and, without any additional steps or compromise to performance, run on devices that use Microsoft's DirectX graphics pipeline. We demoed the sample app, using raw GL ES 2 graphics, on the WP8 phone alongside identical builds on an iPad 3, Android Nexus 7, Blackberry PlayBook and Windows 7 laptop. There was a lot of very positive feedback, including from members of the Windows Phone team who dropped by.

The show itself was almost four full days, with speaker slots on a wide range of subjects throughout the day. Of particular interest from a gaming point of view was Xbox Live integration and how to take advantage of the OS' live tiles feature. I also had some pretty interesting chats with members of the Kinect and SmartGlass teams who were demoing new software and had some interesting ideas for future cross platform uses of their tech.

A highlight of the show was playing with the new Windows phones from Nokia (the Lumia 820 and 920) and HTC, plus the new ARM Surface tablet, which Microsoft gave out free to attendees and which we'll also be supporting in the near future. It was good to see some very solid and user friendly new hardware, with the HTC 8X phone especially being one of the best looking and most hand-friendly phones I've ever used.

Attendees were very varied and we spoke to a wide range of both app and game developers. Most interesting for us was that there were a lot of enterprise developers interested in taking their apps cross platform, but also plenty of business guys who were building games on the side! It was noticeable how much new interest there is in cross-platform development with developers eyeing up the arrival of Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10, and also in C++ development since Microsoft have opened up a native path for Windows Phone.