Creating a Windows Phone 7 Series application

Yay, long article time!

With the release of the Windows Phone 7 Series (I really really hate that name so I’m gonna just use winmo7) SDK, I decided to give it a shot and see how hard (or even easy?) creating an application on the platform would be.

I should probably mention I have very little experience coding in SilverLight and only dabbled with it a while ago, and I’ve been coding in C# for a good half year or so now but once again not quite that much experience in the language. On top of that, most C# applications I’ve written use Windows Forms and not WPF. I’ve also decided that my first application will be a simple browser for Amazon S3 (considering how much I’ve been fiddling with it recently), of whose API I have zero experience with as well. So from what I can tell, I have quite a learning curve ahead of me

I’m not going to go over any problems I have over the IDE, APIs, language, etc… but I’m going to try to focus on the experience of creating an actual application for the platform.

Initial Setup

The download and install of the SDK was relatively painless. It did take quite a while though because I had the beta of Visual Studio 2010 still installed and the SDK requires either the RC or it will install Visual Studio 2010 Express on its own. I didn’t really feel like downloading and installing Visual Studio 2010 again, so I had to uninstall VS2010 along with the .Net 4 beta. After which, the SDK installer downloaded and installed the RC for me. It was kind of annoying how it didn’t really tell me why the beta simply HAD to be uninstalled and I had to search through the depths of their forums to figure it out, but I guess most shouldn’t have this problem.

One thing to remember if you’re using the Express version of VS2010 though, I don’t think it’s possible to have any VCS integration so you’ll have to do it outside the IDE.

My First App

Opening up VS2010, I’m presented with a few nice big buttons on pre-set winmo7 specific projects. You can create a Windows Phone App, a Windows Phone List App (not sure what this is exactly but it’s somehow specific to “list and navigation controls”) and a Windows Phone Library.

I figured I want an application and I’ll code in a simple library for working with S3 inside that.

So I went ahead and choose the first option and it creates a nice looking UI preview for me with the phone chrome and all so I can see exactly how it will look. Not bad. Running the program launches the emulator (which takes quite a while :/) and launches my app which currently does nothing. Good enough of a Hello World for me!

Also of interest, the emulator need only be loaded ONCE. It can then be used for multiple debug/run sessions, very nice considering how long it took to load up!

Designing the S3 Browser

So at this point I need to figure out how I want the program to look and behave. I’ve decided to use this desktop S3 Browser by NetSDK Software as a basis on functionality. At the bare minimum, I’m going to need a way for users to enter in their keys and save them (because typing them in every time on a mobile device will DEFINITELY be annoying). They then need to be able to view buckets, and then be able to explore the contents of each bucket. Perhaps even adding in the ability to upload, download, delete and rename files if possible. Though at this point, I’m not even sure if winmo7 has a concept of a user accessible file system or if it’s abstracted/sandboxed like the iPhone.

Login Screen Design

Screens will probably be something akin to:

(1) Login/Key Manager -> (2) Buckets -> (3) Browse

(To the left you can see my first stab at the login screen using the built in controls.)

I’m going to have screen (1) act as a login screen for now, no saving of multiple accounts. That can be added later. Screen (2) will simply list buckets, and then later allow creation/deletion of them as well possibly. And finally screen (3) will list all your files and other functionality to be added later.

The actual design of each screen may be somewhat trivial, but I want the look and feel of application to be as if its a part of the operating system. A quick google search shows that there ARE a set of guidelines so I’m going to have to read them over and figure it out. From what I can tell though, as long as I’m using the Controls that are given to me then most of it should follow the look/feel anyways.

Initial Thoughts

So far, it seems that Microsoft has gone out of their to make it very easy to develop for the platform – leveraging technologies that developers should already be familiar with: Visual Studio, .Net, Expression Blend, SilverLight, etc…

I suspect that the SDK will become better as time goes on. For example, being based on .Net it wouldn’t surprise me if they allow programmers to use languages other than C#. Also from what I’ve been reading, a lot of people have had success porting over their existing SilverLight applications relatively easily and quickly to the new platform.

What’s Next?

Well, I’ve gotta make a library of some sort to connect to S3. I’ve gotta figure out how to use WPF but that shouldn’t be too difficult. Then I’ve gotta get it all working in the emulator. I’ll post updates as I have them, for now my project is available below along with a repository (SVN where it also turns out I managed to misspell theootz as theooz :/) link – feel free to check it out.

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