Windows Phone Garage II follow up
A few weeks ago Joe Healy and I lead Windows Phone Garage events in Atlanta, Charlotte and Tampa. I must say I was very impressed with what folks in attendance managed to put together in half a day. In each city we had 60-90 attendees, and in each city there were around 10 apps created and shown off at the end of the day. We gave away 3 brand new Windows Phone devices, 3 Zune HDs and a lot more. We saw a few XNA games, but mostly Silverlight apps. We had several high school students learning about Windows Phone development for the first time. And one of those students even won a phone with his simple but cool XNA game.
If you attended those events and have subsequently published your apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace, please let us know about it! Simply visit https://myappisonwindowsphone.com/ and submit a link to your app on the marketplace, and you’ll get an exclusive My App is on Windows Phone t-shirt! Be sure to use “MSEVENT” as the code when you are submitting your information.
During my session on getting a jumpstart on Windows Phone development I showed several things. Here is the slide deck from the talk, followed by resources to get started.
Windows Phone Garage - Application Jumpstart
Resources
- Download and customize the Social Viewer Template for Windows Phone 7 to build applications that incorporate RSS feeds, Twitter streams and Facebook posts, and allow users to share what they read back to various social networks.
- Browse feeds on https://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory and the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket for useful data sources you can build an app around.
- If you want to add cloud services to your Windows Phone apps, including authentication/authorization, storage, and an easy way to call notification services, use the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7. One of the coolest things about the Azure cloud services created with this toolkit is you can reuse them easily with iOS and (coming soon) Android!