Published on Wednesday, January 16, 2013 7:19:45 AM UTC in
Programming
One of the cool features of Windows Phone from the start has been its tight and seamless integration of various sources into common and central places on the phone, like the people hub. To this end, multiple contact entries can be and often even are automatically linked together so information from different origin like Facebook, Twitter or Outlook is aggregated and merged into a single profile. However, this mechanism of deep integration was something that was managed by the operating system and first party apps. As developer, you had no chance of using similar features from within your own apps. With Windows Phone 8, Microsoft has improved this and added a way for us developers to integrate with a user's contacts list. Read the article over at SilverlightShow:
Published on Monday, January 7, 2013 4:26:45 PM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
With Windows Phone 8 the number of markets where users can get apps and games has been increased to a whopping 191 [1]. And even with Windows Phone 7.8, by the time of writing 95 markets are available [2]. These are quite impressive numbers compared to the opportunities we had when Windows Phone was released initially. Naturally now topics like localization become more and more interesting even for smaller apps, to stimulate customers' interest outside the English-speaking world. Windows Phone supported this from the beginning, however the tooling was somewhat inferior to what we were used to from other Microsoft platforms. In Windows Phone 8, Microsoft has improved the developer experience for localization and made it significantly more comfortable to translate your applications to different languages. In this article, I'll take a detailed look at what has changed.
Published on Friday, December 28, 2012 9:03:55 AM UTC in
Programming
Windows Mobile, the discontinued predecessor of today's Windows Phone, had a strong position in the field of enterprise development. Not only were companies able to manage devices comfortably, it also had all sorts of valuable additional business features available. Development options were rich, ranging from native development in C++ to managed code using the .NET Compact Framework, to various other development environments provided by third parties. With Windows Phone, Microsoft took a bold move into the direction of consumer satisfaction and focused a lot on end-user features. Although great for average users, it implicated a lot of simplifications and dropped features for the enterprise world, for which it hence was considered a step backwards by a lot of people with focus on business software. In fact, a lot of companies dogded Windows Phone 7 and kept using Windows Mobile as their preferred platform for internal applications. With Windows Phone 8, Microsoft now has put a lot of effort into offering sufficient choices and features for that target audience too. In this article, we'll cover the most important ones of these.
Published on Sunday, December 16, 2012 7:06:00 AM UTC in
Personal
This week I attended a Live 360! conference in Florida for which I won a free pass in SilverlightShow's "Futuristic Challenge" a few weeks ago [1]. If you're interested in reading my impressions on the the conference, you can find an article with some detailed descriptions and photos here:
Published on Tuesday, December 11, 2012 3:34:29 PM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
In the last part of the series [1], we talked about the new screen resolutions that have been introduced with Windows Phone 8. This is one of the features not only exciting for end users, but also important to learn about for developers. However, one thing we didn't see was how the development eco system enables you to actually test your apps with these different device features. Time to get our hands on the improved developer tools, including a detailed look on the emulators, the Windows Phone Profiler, the Store Test Kit and the new Simulation Dashboard. The full article is available on SilverlightShow:
Published on Monday, December 3, 2012 4:40:10 PM UTC in
Programming
Microsoft has always been quite strict on hardware specifications for Windows Phone devices. This has both advantages as well as some drawbacks. For example, to developers this means that they don't have to worry as much about what features are available on devices and which ones aren't, something that is a lot more annoying to deal with on other platforms like Android. On the other hand, strict specifications also limit the possibilities of hardware vendors to divert and the options of customers to choose between e.g. high-end and low-end devices.
Published on Wednesday, November 28, 2012 10:30:06 AM UTC in
Announcements
I'll be at the ALM Days 2012 conference tomorrow and on Friday. If any of you are interested in meeting me in person, contact me on Twitter. Of course we can talk non-ALM topics like Windows Phone or other things there too :-). I'm also doing one of the workshops on Friday (living your architecture and ALM in practice), including a short guest appearance by ALM MVP Sven Hubert – it's still possible to get tickets for it.
Published on Wednesday, November 28, 2012 10:02:14 AM UTC in
Programming
Developing software for Windows Phone always meant developing managed code. Whether it was traditional development in Silverlight to create your apps or if you decided to build games in XNA, you never left the cozy world of a managed runtime environment. While usually this is something that gives you much more benefits than drawbacks, there are situations where having the possibility to use unmanaged code would be very desirable. Unfortunately, until now using managed code was not a conscious decision you could make as the developer, but rather a limitation of the platform that was imposed on you, and a choice that you didn't have. With version 8 of Windows Phone, Microsoft opens up the platform to unmanaged third party code and allows you to develop in C++.
Published on Friday, November 23, 2012 6:59:32 PM UTC in
Programming
In the first part of this series, I have introduced you to some of the fundamental changes in Windows Phone 8 on the operating system level. A lot of the improvements however go far beyond that and affect not only the local situation on devices, but the surrounding infrastructure and phone ecosystem as a whole. With this, I not necessarily mean the great improvements that have been introduced for the Windows Phone Store [1] or in the field of business opportunities – there's also a lot in the box on a very technical level that's not obvious to a quick passing view. One of these things is what I want to talk about today: Compile in the Cloud.
Published on Monday, November 19, 2012 7:09:00 PM UTC in
Programming
It's now two years, almost to the day, since I have received my first Windows Phone device - a shiny Samsung Omnia 7 that allowed me to develop and test applications outside the emulator for the first time. The device is still around and serves well, even though I personally have moved on to a Lumia. I may have switched devices, but I never considered switching to a different platform. I still love Windows Phone, both as a user and as a developer. So naturally, now that the Windows Phone 8 platform and tools have been officially launched and are available publically to everyone, I want to pick up writing articles again to "bring the joy" of all the new features to the developer community :).
