Windows Phone 7 developer resources – start building cool apps now | Hacker News Reader

Windows Phone 7 developer resources – start building cool apps now

blogs.msdn.com

26 pointsAlfredTwo30 comments

Announcing obvious bias here, but IMO one of the best things about WP7 is how easy / good the tools are; making WP7 apps has way less of a learning curve than iOS, and once you get proficient with them, you can make entire apps in an afternoon, it's really easy to be productive and have great looking apps with animations and transitions.

You're perhaps not the right person to ask all these questions, but maybe you'll be able to answer...

Do you know how the application store will work? If I write a WP7 app, can a user download it from my website or do I have to be listed in the store?

And if I have to be listed in the store, what restrictions are there on apps?

I ask because the main thing preventing me from being interested in WP7 is the lack of a decent web browser (Wikipedia's WP7 article claims the browser is "halfway between IE7 and IE8").

So, is there any chance that someone could port Chrome or Opera to WP7? Or is there no way to get HTML5 on WP7 at all?

It pretty much has to be in the app store (of course some other methods, if you treat the phone as a dev phone, but clearly that's not scalable).

The web browser is actually quite good for a mobile browser. It is true that its missing HTML5 capability, but that's coming over time.

With that said, could you port over a browser? Not likely, you'd have to rewrite from scratch, as it has to be in managed code.

I've never written a web-browser, but if it makes use of sockets (which I assume they do), you'll also be stuck, as this version doesn't have 3rd party support to access sockets.

You'll probably need to wait until a future rev of the SDK, at which point IE9 will probably be just around the corner.

This lack of standards compliance in regards to browsers/ms is getting extremely old. For that reason alone I'm not going to write apps for this phone and I'm a c# guy. It's time we stopped supporting things that break the web intentionally or otherwise.

I can't agree with this more. It's really frustrating to write web apps that work on all the standards compliant browsers, and then have to make all sorts of hacky changes to them because Microsoft decides to do its own thing.

We're a .net shop, but now we just recommend that our users use other browsers to get the best experience. It looks like that won't be changing when it comes to mobile access either.

> is there any chance that someone could port Chrome or Opera to WP7?

Unlikely. It would imply a full rewrite - WinMo 7 runs only managed code.

It's similar to Apple's model, but the restrictions are much more clear-cut and reasonable (no hate speech, app should do what it says it does, etc).

As to the Chrome/Opera port, afaik it's possible but it would be pretty tricky.

What makes you say they have a smaller learning curve than iOS? Is that assuming previous knowledge of Microsoft development tools? Or do you think that someone who only has experience with say C or Ruby would have an easier time of picking up Windows Phone dev tools over Xcode/Cocoa?

For the average developer, I think that C# is more similar to modern languages like Python or C++ than Obj-C, and there's less boilerplate syntax that you have to write.

For example, things like making lists with custom tiles are really straightforward and quick (just draw out the template visually for each type of item and use bindings to bind to properties of the object). You can get away with writing a lot less code, except for the actual details of your app.

I haven't coded in C# in over 4 years now, but interestingly, I found Objective-C to be way more pythonic than C#. It feels pretty much like python with static typing bolted on.

I agree actually, I kind of look at Obj-C as "Native Ruby"; it's a good language for sure, but I think it's faster and easier to write C#, especially with C# 3.5/4.0 (where I can think in a functional programming paradigm with map/reduce/filter/etc)

> the best things about WP7 is how easy / good the tools are

Sadly, they won't run on any OS I use.

Actually, MonoDevelop runs on your OS (and supports Silverlight), so you could do a majority of the code work on OS X / Linux, then only have to use Windows OS for the last 15% or so. WP7 is just Silverlight with phone-specific libraries on it (like accessing contacts, accelerometer, etc)

I didn't say they can't. I just say they won't. Ever ;-)

Then why post at all? I mean, criticism with reasonable justifications is one thing, but "Not on My Machine!" doesn't move the conversation forward in any direction at all.

I think it's fair to say that any time Windows, Microsoft, or .Net are mentioned here, your unwillingness to consider them is pretty well implied.

Call me consistent.

There is a deeper reason to that: I like diversity. Windows is about an x86, IBM-PC-based world. Now, with WP7, they, again, try to standardize hardware in order to commoditize it for their software. That's not healthy in the long run.

Consider our PCs compared to their GPUs. PCs are a very standardized platform, with little variation allowed between different models. The average PC of 2010 is only a couple times faster than the average PC of 2005. Now, compare the average GPU of 2005 to the average GPU of 2010. The reason it happens is because GPUs are a widely diverse bunch. A couple years back, we were building number crunchers (we still are) out of x86s. Now, we build them out of GPUs.

The day a GPU standard emerges is the day evolution will be tamed to a much more "market friendly" pace. We all lose.

Windows desktop runs on the AMD64 platform as well as Itanium. It used to run on some other platforms like Alpha.

Windows Embedded runs on ARM and SH, in addition to x86.

I just find it funny that the same people who will make this sort of complaint, will then use Apple products that have an order of magnitude less diversity.

> Windows desktop runs on the AMD64 platform as well as Itanium

No. It doesn't. AMD64 is an extension of x86 and Itanium support for XP was dropped in 2005. The last Windows to support Itanium was 2003 server. And NT ran fine on Alpha - I used it. But it doesn't now and has't for a long time. It's funny that what spells death of a mainstream platform is not when that platform is discontinued, but when Microsoft discontinues its Windows support.

We live under Microsoft's grip. If WP7 becomes dominant and Microsoft decides to drop ARM support, dead it will be.

I think you're wrong on several counts:

1) While AMD64 is an extension of x86, the result in exploiting it is largely new architectural guidelines (things like different calling conventions for common calls) and one of the reasons why every major OS has an AMD64 version of the OS which distinct from their x86 version.

2) Windows Server 2008 R2, released in retail about one year ago, support Itanium. That's the last version to support Itanium. But still has standard MS support, so you can get hot fixes for it for the next 10 years.

3) Millions, if not billions of ARM processors are shipped every year OUTSIDE of mobile phones. There is no mobile phone, no matter how dominant, that could kill ARM simply by moving to a new architecture.

It actuality, it was the other way around: Microsoft dropped support for the Itanium because it was widely considered a flop with dismal sales figures years before Microsoft ceased development.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2010/04/02/...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#Market_share

> It actuality, it was the other way around

Or could it that be that Microsoft support was not enough to make Itanic successful? Microsoft evidently redirected efforts toward AMD64 as soon as it became obvious it was the low-hanging fruit in the 64-bit space. Intel also diverted resources from Itanium in order to be able to compete with AMD in the extended x86 space. There are many factors in Itanium's failure beside inherent merits.

OTOH, Alpha, MIPS, PPC/PReP were not the huge flop Itanic was and, still, dropped out of sight the moment NT for them was discontinued.

Until very recently you would not be able to launch a new architecture/ISA without first convincing Microsoft to support it.

The last Windows to support Itanium is Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7, and Server 2008 / Vista ran on Itanium too.

Paul, I hate to disagree with you, I always enjoy your comments, but Wikipedia says (and it may be wrong) that while 2008 supported IA-64, both Vista and W7 do not support IA-64.

Ah, actually you might be right. Well fwiw it exists, we just don't sell it.

In reality though you don't sell any version of Windows for Itanium. You just offer to sell them. :-)

On a tertiary note, every once in awhile I have to debug through optimized IA-64 assembly, it hurts my brain - if you think understanding x86 or amd64 is hard, try an ISA where every instruction has like 20 side-effects... I try to avoid it as much as humanly possible

Touche, I also forgot you actually work for them, so you'd be the one to know ;)

What is a good developer win7 phone to test with?

I'd get one with a keyboard, like the Dell Venue Pro, so you can test both with and w/o the physical keyboard. Besides that, they all have to have min specs, so it shouldn't matter too much which phone you get.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com