I did this "presentation" using Notepad - it was all a bit last minute....
The theme of it was about how I've just built my first WP7 app - RunSat - and the lessons learned
I think (hope?) the presentation was better when it had a demo attached!
Timeline
- last November Samsung gave me a Omnia II.
- then I bought an iPhone
- then Samsung gave me a Bada phone
- 12 days ago I wrote my first Silverlight/WPF app
- then last Thursday Paul Foster lent me a WP7 phone
1. Wp7 development is a pleasure compared to:
WP7 dev was a pleasure
- PC dev,
- WinCE (MFC, then CF2) on Wm6.5,
- Monotouch,
- Obj-C xCode,
- Bada C++
- a teeny bit Eclipse/Android
2. Installation of the tools was super quick
Zune for PC installation was a bit slow...
3. Device-based dev is super fast, reliable and painless
- debugging support is great
- really miss wifi debugging from MonoTouch
4. Emulator-based dev is a bit slower!
And lack of GPS in emulator is a pain
Some workarounds available - e.g. reactive
5. Silverlight/XAML
as a non-user 10 days ago, I've found this very easy to pick up
- but I'm a world away from mastering XAML.
- efficiency doesn't seem to matter ?
- Blend makes blood come out of my ears
6. Tombstoning is actually pretty easy
- unless your data doesn't really fit
- mine didn't
7. When you Google (Bing?) around for sample code, it's definitely a bit confusing working out what WPF/SL3/SL4 code/xaml will work on WP7
- but there is lots of good blogging available :)
8. Bing maps integration was super quick and super nice :)
- didn't support MVVM perfectly
9. Fighting the Appstore guidelines - I hate the app stores
- app store approval gotchas...
--- pivot control abuse?
--- GPS - request access yourself and supply privacy
--- run idle - request access yourself
--- help and support
--- dark/light theming
10. Cross platform
- this app came from WM6.5
- it went to Monotouch
- it went from Monotouch to WP7
- next up is MonoDroid (preview 7 already)
Details of cross platform
- GPS integration - just effected one module
- File IO - main IO just worked
- BUT open/close/exists/delete code needed changing for IsolatedStorage
- DateTime (clock) source information
- XML serialisation - XMLDocument not available on WP7 - had to port code across to XDocument - not a biggie - also used JSON.Net
- Web services calls - legacy ASMX didn't work... had to hand craft my XML :( - Would probably have been quicker to change the server api's to newer WCF services.
Cross platform
- big story is how much I haven't rewritten...
- UI - lots of new code to write
---- tables/lists
---- WP7 Pivot/Panorama controls against tables and paged scrollviews
---- notifications
- MVVM pattern made this very manageable (UIDialog on MonoTouch also made my life much simpler)
- will be much easier again in 2 days time?
- app lifecycle management - still working this out - tombstoning is quite straight forward but requires thought...
- tests... nunit runs on all platforms
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