Launching a Startup mobile App in Australia? How hard can it *really* be?? Day 11 Report
The first thing I want to point out here about the upcoming posts is that although I am going to mention some of the toolkits & great helpers I have used for the development of the WP7 app I do not consider myself a professional developer anymore so this is NOT a how to build a Windows Phone App Tutorial. I am not going to waste your time by talking about the details of building the actual app as that isn't one of the goals of this series either. There are more than enough already in existence (that I have reused code samples from!). There are some upcoming in person events & webinars that you should tune into if you want to learn more about Windows Phone development: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/bizspark_au/archive/2011/11/04/windows-phone-training-workshops-webcasts-and-application-clinics.aspx
I am busily focusing on building the application at the moment so there isn’t too much new to report except that we are looking for a few more iPhone users who would like to test the beta version.
I expect to have the Phone 7 version ready for beta testing late next week (as I am disappearing offline on leave from Sun – Wed).
In the development so far I have used the following very helpful resources & Tips that you may also find useful:
Map your development machine keyboard to the Phone 7 emulator:
- Note: The Windows Phone Emulator supports mapping of the keyboard on your development computer to the hardware keyboard on a Windows Phone (by default is not enabled). To enable the keyboard in the Windows Phone Emulator press the PAGE UP or PAUSE/BREAK key. To disable it, press the PAGE DOWN or PAUSE/BREAK key. For more information, see the following article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ff754352(VS.92).aspx.
Bing Maps Development
Get Started with Bing Maps development:
Step 1: |
To get started with Bing Maps, you’ll need a Maps Developer Account. |
Step 2: |
Get started with the SDKs for Windows Phone 7, Android, iOS, and use the REST APIs |
Step 3: |
To keep up-to-date with the latest Bing Maps news, read the Bing Maps Developer Blog. For help from the Bing Maps community, use the Bing Maps Community Forums. |
Pasted from <https://www.microsoft.com/maps/developers/mobile.aspx>
Windows Azure Toolkit
The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone really saved me a lot of time. I have mentioned it before but I want to re-iterate the value once again. The set up wizard put all the connections, and architecture in place so all I needed to do was define the functionality specific to my application. https://watwp.codeplex.com/
OData:
There is a great video here on setting up Phone 7 (and other apps) to utilise oData from SQLAzure: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/showcase/details.aspx?uuid=083d55f4-c0d4-4309-8996-49d63ce14c60
The oData Client for WP7 is here: https://odata.codeplex.com/releases/view/54698#DownloadId=161862
SQL Azure Security Requirements
I also ran into some trouble where my application suddenly stopped working when I was working on it in the office. It turns out that we have a pretty thorough firewall setup in the office so the ports I needed access to to access SQLAzure where locked down. Check out the ports you need open (such as TCP port 1433) to work with Azure / SQL Azure before you spend a day debugging an application that isn’t broken :/ https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff394108.aspx