Windows Phone 7 – App in 30 days

Today, I attended the excellent Windows Phone Bootcamp in London where we learnt all about the Windows Mobile 7 framework (a great write up of the day here from Gary Ewan Park – @grep13).  Previously, during my MSc in Computing Science at University of Strathclyde, I encountered the old Windows Mobile framework which was quite challenging as none of the standard .NET controls where present in the .NET Compact Framework.  This meant that a lot of code that you would normally rely on had to written from scratch.

Mango,  Windows 7′s Operating System, visually looks fantastic and has come a long way from the days of the old Window’s OS.  This is down to a lovely UI, Metro, and an animated homescreen which displays information to the user as interactive tiles.

Anyway, back to the BootCamp.  Nokia was kind enough to give us lucky attendees a brand new Nokia Lumina 800 and 20 really lucky attendees the device on the day (which I was one of those 20 developers).  The only condition, well Gentleman’s Agreement of some sorts,  for getting this phone was that you have to publish your app within 30 days! Not long but I’m up for a challenge. I have always said the best way to learn a new skill, language or SDK is to dive right in at the deep end and this seems like a great way to do it, plus I got the phone as an incentive.  I paid my £65 subscription to App Hub, Microsoft’s Xbox and Phone Marketplace this afternoon and made the leap.

I’ve decided to blog about my experiences for the next 30 days with WP7 in a mini-series I like to call App in 30 days.

I plan to go from nothing to App in 30 days, idea to UI mockups to implementation to Marketplace all in my spare time at night and weekends.  By March 6th 2012 I will have my first app in the Marketplace and a better understanding of the native framework.

Better get some sleep as it all kicks off tomorrow. This should be exciting.