Back in January, we brought you the news of the first independent Windows Phone developer conference not sponsored by Microsoft called WP DevCon occurring October 22-24th in Burlingame, CA.

The listing and descriptions of the classes being offered during the conference hav been released and interestingly enough, there's a whole class on Windows Phone Apollo development. Seeing as the classes are in late October, perhaps we shouldn't be shocked that Windows Phone 8 will be discussed at length during such an event. But what makes it interesting is some of the details revealed.

The session is being led by Paras Wadehra, Principal Software Engineer at Good Technology and ex-Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft:

"This session will guide you on how to develop for Windows Phone Apollo, the new version of Windows Phone due out by the end of this year. You will learn the new resolutions needed to support and target Windows Phone Apollo, the new hardware you will program against, the changes coming to the Windows Phone Marketplace, and much more. There will be some code shown, which will help you migrate your Windows Phone Mango apps to target Windows Phone Apollo. The session will also help you understand the marketing aspects of apps targeting Windows Phone Apollo in order to help you get your apps approved the first time. You will also learn about the new emulator as well as new reporting features available in the Windows Phone Marketplace. At the end of the session, you will be ready to write and upload apps to the new Windows Phone Marketplace. Please note: Knowledge of the Windows Phone Developer ecosystem is required. In order to appreciate the difference between Mango and Apollo, it is also preferable that you have developed at least one app currently in the Marketplace."

Since the session is in October and Apollo is mentioned as "due out by the end of this year" it sounds like we're still looking at a November or December release for the new OS. That's the bad news and contradicts some earlier rumors of a possible early October release (though schedule changes are certainly plausible).

The good news is the Windows Phone 8 emulator will already be out by that point and we bet it will be released in June when Microsoft holds their own developer conference in San Francisco. It's also the first real confirmation of different resolutions being offered in Windows Phone 8, though once again, this shouldn't be a surprise at this point.

Read the whole Windows Phone DevCon catalog here (PDF) and visit their site (www.wpdevcon.net) for more information in case you want to attend. Thanks, rutvik19, for the tip!