Mar 11 2011

The life of the W7P app.

Category: Timeline � Administrator @ 11:10

First let me start off by saying that I wished I has started this blog earlier since much time has past and I've seen so many code snippets and sample apps that it would be hard now to try and disassemble all that has transpired since I started this development process.

For all of you pursuing development of a W7P app I highly reccomend that you start a blog first and complete the app later.  Seems rather backwards but you'll appreciate it later.  it's best to document what you've used in your app and what else that you thought you might use.   Not only does this keep the code straight in your own head it provides a wealth of info for those just trying to get the most pertinent info on WP7 subjects. 

As you guessed by now I'm going to detail how this app gets and displays its data.  At this point into the dev process I'm not going to go in any particular order but rather start with the changes in process now and go back down the path to where and how this application got started.

As for this app, it came into existence because of my involvement with swimming and managing a web site for a local club.  I found that swimmers really didn't know what their times were for each event and relied upon significant others (mom and dad) to carry and transcribe times into paper logs.  So that if you went to a meet and forgot the paper log you may not know the best time for each event since seed times may have been submitted long before the swimmer achieved their best time.  I felt that having this data on the Windows phone was a great asset to the swimmer and their families and fans.

Since I'm involved in Microsoft technologies, it was almost a given that I would develop this for the Windows 7 platform.  It originally started out as a Windows desktop application long before the Windows 7 Phone came along.  When the phone came out I immediately saw how this could benefit others.  I immediately got the W7P tools and began development.

At first I thought that I would develop a Silerlight 3 application on then port that to the phone.  But I quickly saw that code does not nicely port from Silverlight 3 to the phone.  The big reason I hit first was that on the phone your app is seen as a true client whereas a Silverlight app could be interpreted as a Web application.  The difference quickly catches up to you when you start trying to contact URL's across the web.

So I jumped directly to the Windows 7 Phone development tools.  And that is where this blog begins.

 

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