Brandon Watson, head of the Developer Experience team for Windows Phone 7, confirms that a developer-focused announcement for Windows Phone 7 is coming Thursday morning. Details are sparse but Watson hints at copy and paste in a rather cryptic tweet:
“Copy and paste no longer counts as a “request.” We’ve heard it plenty. đ Answer coming tomorrow AM…”
Watson further clarifies that this is not an announcement for an on-phone feature but for the developer platform. While we may not receive confirmation of the  launch date of copy/paste, we may see support for these commands appear within the Windows Phone 7 developer tools. This is just a reasonable guess and, without more context, it is difficult to extrapolate exactly what Microsoft intends to announce.
We do know that copy and paste is a feature that is not present on Windows Phone 7 at launch. The decision to drop copy/paste is a highly contentious one that has folks up in arms even though the mobile platform will not officially launch until October 11th.
While most of the grumbling about copy and paste has come from the consumer, the lack of copy and paste also affects developers. Picture yourself as a developer who is trying to write an Evernote-like application for Windows Phone 7 without a built-in API to let you copy a URL from one application and paste it into another.
Microsoft is painfully aware of this shortcoming; let’s hope the Redmond company announces something tomorrow to ease customer’s and developer’s concerns alike.
[Via Twitter and wmpoweruser]