Answering The Question – Can Windows Phone Multitask

When Microsoft shared the developer story for Windows Phone 7 at MIX, there was a lot of talk about multitasking and if it was even an option in Windows Phone 7. Microsoft has been very careful in what they say when it comes to multitasking. There’s been no official yes or no answer and because of this, the public has pretty much ruled that Windows Phone 7 does not multitask.

Enter Mark Arteaga, a fellow Windows Mobile MVP. Mark’s recent post takes an in-depth look at multitasking on Windows Phone 7. He talks about the 4 different application states and how they impact applications. He goes on to create a sample application that simply increments a counter as time goes by. With the sample application deployed to the emulator, Mark launches the Start Menu, opened another application called EnergizeIT Mobile, launched the Start Menu again, selected the sample application and it returns to the foreground showing that the counter value has incremented while the process was in the background. For all the developers in the crowd, Mark even provides you the code he used to run the threads.

End result is that Windows Phone 7 does support multitasking and from the looks of what Mark did, it supports more than the 7 simple situations that Apple has exposed in version 4 of their iPhone OS.

You can check out all the details and even the sample code that Mark provides, over on his blog.