Launching a Startup mobile App in Australia? How hard can it *really* be?? Day 8 Report

Today I swapped my other hats for me developer hat for a few hours. As I have volunteered to do the data setup on Azure & the Phone 7 application development. As I have all my data & use cases now defined it was quite simple to ensure the data structure was set up in Azure. next I decided to check out the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone – its free and you can download it from Codeplex here. It comes with really detailed documentation and some awesome walkthroughs.

My first challenge was to readdress the authentication question. It seemed silly not to include either a membership model or an integrated login when the tool kit made it so simple. I thought about the benefits of both models (there is a good definition here on the pros & cons for both) and I ultimately decided that I didn’t want to maintain a separate user membership database – and as it seemed that the Access Control Service made integration with other logins simple. So…. I followed through these steps and very quickly had the Toolkit installed. The setup ensures you get any extra bits & pieces you may not have on your machine already so that made it quite easy.

I then got my ACS token for Facebook integration setup following these instructions for getting started with ACS integration with Facebook. These articles are also quite handy to review: https://acs.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Getting%20Started&referringTitle=Documentation, https://acs.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Facebook

I had a few issues with setting up ACS because I had half setup windows live as well as Facebook because I was not sure if I was going to use both or not. It caused some confusion with the rules, but once I reduced it to just the Facebook integration it seemed to resolve the namespace error I was receiving.

So once I had a namespace configured, I started a new project, picked the Windows Phone Cloud application template, followed the instructions for setting up the certificates & started to debug. I was pleasantly surprised to be already testing out my new phone app with Facebook integration:

I still have a few more things to do on the Facebook app side of things to get the integration looking how I want it too particularly: format the appearance and options provided to the user when they sign in including the layout of the objects I want to work with and the actions allowed by the users…. But its Sunday & its sunny outside – so both that & starting to look at the rest of the app development is going to have to wait till later