Following Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 reveal at Mobile World Congress, the platform has received a considerable momentum boost thanks to GCD 2010, MIX10 and SXSW.

It's a good time then for a quick recap; something Microsoft's strategist Andre Vrignaud has been doing on his flight back to Seattle.

He's particularly keen to focus on the important of cloud computing to the whole project.

"The key point to consider is that in today's world it takes a combination of hardware, software, and services to make the magic of cloud computing (and cloud gaming!) tick," he points out in his Ozymandias blog.

"We have hardware that spans all screens (TV, PC, mobile); we have the cloud services connecting them (Xbox LIVE and Azure), and finally, with our recent development tool announcements (Silverlight and XNA Game Studio), we have the development ecosystem that spans all of these device."

More, merrier

With these elements in place, he says the opportunity is open for developers to "write once, sell many" - albeit with some modifications.

The tech demo which gaining much attention was Luma Arcade's The Harvest.

"This demo was done in three weeks, and reuses 90 percent of the code across the Xbox 360, Windows, and Windows Phone 7," Vrignaud explains.

Changes between devices included input code but art resources were used as-is on the phone, while a unified API via XNA allowed the title to award achievements on all three devices without a single change.

"We'll be talking a lot more about how titles can use our cloud gaming services to easily create rich, connected experiences," he predicts.

"We're working hard to make it easy for developers to enable these experiences in a way that will allow gamers to connect, play, and socialise seamlessly wherever and whenever they want."

[source: Ozymandias]