We all know that Windows Phone 7 has been available across a few carriers for a short amount of time now. Some of us have been wondering when we would hear about the root and jail breaking being done? That time is here and as most of you said already, it didn’t take long.
Thanks to iStartedSomething giving reports of an Australian developer Chris Walshie, we now know that it is possible to run “native unmanaged code” on a retail Windows Phone 7 device. He stated that he would be sharing the codes and yes, it’s a managed app running unmanaged code. We found his videos you will see below proving this is true.
According to Redmondpie, this all started out when Hounsell from XDA-Developers noticed that Samsung’s Network Profile application in WP7 ran on native code, instead of the usual Silverlight-managed code that all third-party apps are supposed to run on. Hounsell documented some interesting characteristics of the application that gave it its native capabilities – most notably a DLL called “Microsoft.Phone.InteropServices”, which if poked the right way provided COM access. Chris was then able to deploy a WP7 app using the developer side loading process keeping in mind Hounsell’s entire idea. This gave him root access to the system which is a must for “jail broken” apps to be able to run in the future.
Here is another video by Chris Walshie showing the root, navigating to an Application that has been installed, back to the root, and into the Windows folder to find the magical coredll.dll
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Source: Redmondpie & Walshieme