Just a few weeks after the launch of Windows Phone 7 around the world, the inevitable attempts to jailbreak the operating system is yielding some interesting results. Recently, the Australian developer Chris Walsh was successfully able to prove a method to run “native” unmanaged code on a retail Windows Phone 7 device. The pieces starting falling into place when user “hounsell” on xda-developers noticed the third party application in the WP7 marketplace (Network Profile by Samsung) used “native” code, not Silverlight-managed code as all non-Microsoft apps should. After looking into it more carefully, Walsh documented some interesting characteristics of the application that gave it its native capabilities, most notably a DLL called “Microsoft.Phone.InteropServices”, which he realized poking the right way provided COM access.

Building upon the idea, Chris was able to successfully code and deploy a valid WP7 application using the developer sideloading process to a Windows Phone 7 device that inherited the ability to run unmanaged code. Even though this breakthrough pretty much provides root access to the core of the Windows CE-based system including registry and file system necessary for future jailbroken applications, the last major piece of the jailbreaking puzzle remains – sideloading an application on a common non-developer device, since such an app would never make it through marketplace certification.We know someone will end up figuring it out though so it is only a matter of time.

Shortly after the discovery, Walsh tweeted the following:

Making sure to waste no time, he followed up by posting a video demonstrating what file access looks like and it’s pretty exciting as well. He noted in his blog that this is just a preview and that “You’ve got FULL access, create, delete, browse files etc. Just can’t delete system ROM files, IE coredll.dll (obviously).” You can check out the video below:

So what does this mean for the average user? We are looking to something similar to jailbreaking iDevices for the Windows Phone 7 devices. Expect to see a growing number of unofficial apps that didn’t pass marketplace certification, which would also result in a Cydia-like unofficial App Store that would end up fostering the unofficial apps. Everyone should be more satisfied with their Windows Phone 7 devices soon enough. Does this make the WP7 device owners happy out there? What about you who don’t own a WP7 device but were considering it? Share your thoughts and comments below!

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[Source: Chris Walsh (blog)]

Authors: _GadgetNews

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