The day before yesterday I was part of a Windows Phone 7 training day here in Wellington, New Zealand. Most of the day was presented by Nigel Parker, Web Development Advisor for Microsoft New Zealand, but I got to present some code demos for the attending developers. At the training, I promised to upload my sample code, so I did. But I also added some of my thoughts after the event. Sorry…
During the day, Nigel presented some interesting information, including some of the new things unveiled at TechEd US. So even though I have been following the WP7 since the beginning, there were some new stuff for me as well. He had also managed to score a couple of prototype phones that we got to play with. Or…we got to play with one of them, as the other had a dog food build from last week. For those of you who are not working closely to Microsoft, dog food build means an internal daily build. So one of the phones had features that we weren’t allowed to see. And the other phone had a broken USB port, and thus had not been updated since Mix10.
The cool thing about playing with a WP7 phone, was that it removed some of the fears I had. I was afraid that the UI would be a bit choppy and unresponsive. At least it looked a bit like that when the demoed the phone at Mix. I assumed that that was something they would polish off before launch. Apparently I was dead-wrong. They UI is not choppy at all, and it responds awesomely. I loved playing with it. iPhone sets the bar pretty high when it comes to responsiveness and feel, but this was just as good.
The only sucky part was the part where Nigel said that the awesome looking Asus devices that they had done all their demos on previously, is a very custom prototype. I know that the phones so far are just ridiculously expensive prototypes, but I really hope Asus releases a phone that looks like the prototype. It is by far one of the best looking phones out there according to me. I like the new iPhone, but I actually prefer the black monolith that Asus has built. Wonder if I can buy one of the prototypes when they release the real phones…
Oh…the Asus phone also has one other cool feature I would love to see on my phone in the future. It can apparently “reverse” its USB port and instead of using it for synching, it simulates a webcam that streams what is currently on the screen. It makes it a whole lot simpler to demo stuff on the phone. I also think that that feature might be the reason why the UI seemed a bit choppy at Mix. I don’t think it was actually the UI, but the webcam simulation…
Well, to make a long story short. I still love the phone after having played with it. I don’t see it as the developers wet dream, but probably a consumer’s. The developer in me would rather program for a WinMo 6.5, but at the end of the day I would put my WP7 in my pocket when I walked from the office. Oh…that reminds me…Nigel mentioned something interesting. Apparently the WinMo platform isn’t as dead as I feared. The WinMo platform will still be developed on and supported, which is awesome. There are just some mobile things that can’t be built on the modern phones (iPhone, Android, WP7 etc), but can still be built for the WinMo platform…
Anyhow, I promised the code samples I used. So here they are: WP7 Training Source Code.zip (183.67 kb)
However, the zip above doesn’t contain all of the ones I used. It contains the ones I wrote myself. The rest of the demos were Microsoft sample applications that can be downloaded here. And the application bar icons that I mentioned that Microsoft had made available to us devs are here.
I think that was it! Stay tuned for future WP7 posts. I will try to get some more up soon. My next planned one is about setting up and working with Push Notifications, which isn’t terribly complicated, but still caused me some grief that you shouldn’t have to endure…
Cheers!