While attending Codemash a few weeks ago, I ended up in a Windows Phone development precompiler (Codemash’s name for a training session). It was my plan to hit mostly mobile and analytics sessions, but I was not originally planning on attending this session. With Windows Phone still struggling for market share, I wasn’t in a rush to work with it. However, other sessions were cancelled because weather had delayed some presenters, so I ended up in this session. Microsoft’s Jeff Blankenburg was teaching the session, and I have enjoyed some of his presentations and a Silverlight fire-starter event in the past. It’s one of my rules of conferences to attend sessions based more on good speakers, rather than based solely on topic.
With regards to marketshare, Jeff made the point during the session that with a less crowded app store, you do have a bit more discoverability. Even if that doesn’t hold up, the platform shares enough similarity with Windows 8 that a port to the Windows Store will be trivial. The Windows App Store isn’t exactly setting the world on fire either, but I’d like to see my app on all of these platforms, and as Windows 8 adoption rises with new machine sales, that marketplace should see constant upticks.
Having worked with Silverlight in the past, I found it pretty easy to get going on Win Phone 8 development. There was some definite rust on my XAML skills, but it came back to me fairly quickly. One thing to keep in mind is that you want to keep things relatively simple on a mobile platform. I have worked on some WPF projects in enterprise settings with MVVM frameworks, dependency injection frameworks, and more. While I followed an MVVM pattern, I just rolled my own with a simple base class.
My project was to do a version of an app I already have in the iOS App Store, VicinityBuzz. It does location based searches of twitter. You can search around you, or by entering an address. The radius is a configurable setting. I like using the app at conferences like Codemash to catch all the chatter that may not have a hashtag. One catch is that obviously only tweets that included location will be found. If folks have that feature turned off in their twitter app, then it won’t show up.
Since I had written the app before (in phonegap for iOS), I knew the feature set and domain cold. The challenge was just getting up to speed with the latest API’s for search and geolocation, and then implementing within a new platform. One of the biggest benefits of this project was getting up to date with the latest Twitter API. I still need to update the version for iOS, as it’s currently non-functional because of api changes over the last several years. I plan on doing that very soon now that I know the latest version.
Anyway, I won’t go into the development details here too much, but I finished a version 1 of VicinityBuzz, and it is now in the windows phone store here, and it’s free. So go check it out. If you like it, I’d love to have some more reviews.
Also, if you are inspired to do any Windows Phone development yourself, you may be interested in a device to do some real testing. I recently found there are some prepaid phones new on Amazon that are dirt cheap for that purpose. Check out the Nokia Lumia 520 and Nokia Lumia 521 on Amazon.
Watch this blog for upcoming posts about working with the Twitter API, and some of the things I learned working with Windows Phone 8. And more mobile in general. I have the bug again…