Getting Started with Windows Phone

Some years ago, I bought my children a Nokia Lumia 520 each. Now, these are lovely little phones and the prospect of using something that only very few of our friends use was exciting.

All the advantages and disadvantages of Windows Phone have been discussed at length in other articles. I personally like the concept of the tiles and the simple design language, however setting up parental controls makes you lose the will to live. Also the kids were complaining about the lack of games, so everyone has their priorities.

Very recently I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to create an App for Windows Phone. I was very excited about this and as someone, who has 10 years of C# under his belt, I wasn’t really worried about how long it would take to get up to speed.

I didn’t anticipate, how smooth the development experience would be. There is an excellent series of tutorial videos available at channel9.com. I’ve used this one: https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Windows-Phone-8-1-Development-for-Absolute-Beginners

With that, I was able to get up to speed with Windows Phone in a single day. If you have ever played with ASP.NET / ASP MVC or even AngularJS, the concepts of a declarative UI (XAML), MVVM and MVC will be familiar to you. (If not, it’s not rocket science either). And, of course, knowing C# helps.

All of that, put together with my favourite dev environment, Visual Studio, enabled me to get the first version of the app out of the door in just 2 weeks. If I compare that to my previous exploits in Android development, I would put it like this:

• Windows Phone dev feels like dancing a waltz.
• Android dev feels like wrestling an angry bear.

Sadly, there is more to the success of product than the ease of development. My children have eventually thrown the Lumias into the corner and are both back on Android.