First round of WP7 development impressions:

(+) A good deal of the C# code/classes I wrote for monotouch (iOS) versions of apps can be re-used as-is from the WP7 version of the app.

(+) Full-on Visual Studio experience that I am used to from my ‘day job’.

(-) Anything using XmlDocument has to be re-done. But it’s not that hard.

(-) There doesn’t seem to be any built-in way to handle compression. You need to get some third party library, and re-write all the stuff I already have working on iPhone using GZipStream. BOO. It seems like the intent is to have Silverlight use the browser’s capabilities to handle gzip content, except for a little issue that prevents you from setting the Accept-Encoding (gzip,deflate) on HTTP requests where you would like the large REST return data to be compressed.

(+) Speed, polish & efficiency – this is obviously biased to some degree by my years of experience with Visual Studio & .NET,  but I am so much more productive, even though I still have to lookup Silverlight ‘nuances’ nearly as often as I do for Android or iOS.

(+) WP7 Emulator works with Fiddler!!! Well, if you read THIS, it does.