This is the Day #4 post in the article series “7 Deadly Sins for Windows Phone Developers!“.

What is Wrath ?

From http://deadlysins.com:

Wrath is manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury.

Why: You’re wired for it. Also, the people around you are pretty damn irritating.

How does Wrath relate to Windows Phone development ?

— uncontrolled rage as developer ..

So, you have decided to spend one of your precious free weekends to code up your dream Windows Phone app. You start, but soon find yourself needing fancy controls, animations or some peculiar tweak. Result – anger. To rub it in, you heard a buddy just made a similar app on a competing platform & is now making buckets of money. *&!@#$%^^& .. right? Well, let’s chill. There are plenty of ways we can help ourselves by taking a look around & not reinventing the wheel. So, let’s see how you, a Windows Phone developer, can avoid Wrath.

• Toolkits: Think you need a special control for your Windows Phone app? Some custom animation for your pages? STOP & look around! There is plenty of help to prevent you from reinventing the wheel. Some awesome toolkits to choose from for your developer arsenal are the Windows Phone Silverlight Toolkit, Coding4Fun Windows Phone Toolkit, Sterling DB, GZipWebClient & many others.
• 3rd Party Tooling: Quite a few MSFT partners are making the Windows Phone ecosystem richer by adding a lot of love for developers. These are mostly in the form of custom controls/animations/frames which really make your life a lot easier. Check out Windows Phone specific offerings from Telerik, ComponentOne & Infragistics.
• Trials & Pricing: Price your work sensibly. If you have spent a lot of effort & think you have a genuinely good app, you absolutely should not give it away for free. Trial mode is a great way to give users a taste of what’s to come & hold back a few features when they actually buy your app. Read both sides of the story here and here .. bottom-line, do what makes sense for your app.
• Monetization: Along the same lines, if you want to make a free app, there absolutely nothing wrong in putting a few advertisements to earn you a few bucks. Yes, ads are annoying; but users will easily overlook the ads if your content stands out. MSFT’s PubCenter Ad Control is a part of the Windows Phone Mango SDK .. adding it to your apps is as easy as dragging a control & registering your app for ad categories. Another great option is AdDuplex – an ad exchange network where you promote other apps & help fellow Windows Phone developers. If you are picky about Ad revenues & low eCPMs, specially in newer Markets, consider using the Windows Phone AdRotator – a single control that fetches Ads from multiple providers for better utilization of your Ad space.
• Stay Tuned-in: Mad at yourself for missing out on some latest marketing offer or Windows Phone developer sweepstake? This is a very happening ecosystem & it helps being as plugged-in as possible. Can you spare an hour every week? Do yourself a favor & listen to Windows Phone Dev Podcast for all that’s latest & greatest for Windows Phone users/developers.
• Just Ask: Stuck late into the night with a roadblock while coding your Windows Phone app? If you have exhausted your own resources, simply ask. Chances are someone else also faced the same quirky problem and there is a way around or there is an awesome open source project to help you out. And the Windows Phone developer community is among the very best you shall get .. we help each other out. So, hit up your fellow Windows Phone devs on StackOverflow or Twitter or some other forum. You’ll be surprised by how far collaboration can get us.

So, next time we get mad, let’s take a step back & evaluate our options. The koolaid isn’t all that bad :). Pick up some fancy controls & make your dream app .. and then make some money! Hopefully, you come back tomorrow for the Day #5 article in this series of “7 Deadly Sins for Windows Phone Developers!“.

Adios!

This is the Day #3 post in the article series “7 Deadly Sins for Windows Phone Developers!“.

What is Sloth ?

From http://deadlysins.com:

Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.

Why: You’re shiftless, lazy, and good fer nuthin’.

How does Sloth relate to Windows Phone development ?

— failure to utilize resources ..

As highly as you may think of our smartphones, they are still tiny devices with limited memory/processing power & precious battery life. Any work we can offload from our smartphones helps in extending battery life and putting data/common processing out somewhere else aids in multi-user/multi-platform mobile solutions. This is where cloud solutions step in with ubiquitous computing, massive scalability & high availability on a pay-per-use model. Cloud & mobility simply makes sense.

So, if you are a Windows Phone developer, have you considered leveraging Windows Azure to augment your Windows Phone solutions? If your answer is anything other than “I went with Amazon/other cloud providers ..”, it is not satisfactory. Here are few ways Windows Phone developers can get around being a Sloth & consider utilizing Azure’s cloud infrastructure for their Windows Phone applications:

• Windows Azure: Learn more about it here. Read up on the possibilities with features, subscriptions, business model & how to get started as a developer. Hint – it is very easy!
• Freebies: As with anything, try it out first & see if it makes sense. There are free Azure Trials for you to play around with. Also, if you have MSDN Subscriptions, significant Azure benefits would come free .. learn more here.
• Data: This is the crux of any mobile app – relational or non-relational. Family members will want to share data between apps running on their devices. You, as a developer, will want to support multiple platforms to maximize your reach. Both of these suggest that data could be cached on devices; but needs to be stored centrally. Enter Azure. Relational data goes into SQL Azure & non-relational data goes into Blobs/Tables .. both with massive scalability & high availability.
• Glance & Go: Remember the “Really” commercials for Windows Phone? Push Notifications in Windows Phone is one of it’s best-selling features and epitomizes the Glance & Go approach. Why the need to launch an app when a simple Live Tile suffices? With Mango, the flipping Live Tiles are also an opportunity for developers to be creative in what gets pushed out as Live Tiles .. invite your users back into your app. Azure can serve as the perfect backend to your Windows Phone app; one that hosts services that wake up to send Push Notifications as Tiles/Toast/Raw to registered phones running your app. And you can fine-tune exactly how much backend horsepower you need depending on your user-base.
• Scalability: You make a seasonal app, like ones that go with NFL season. Or you make an app that skyrockets in downloads but slows down within a month. If your Windows Phone app was leveraging any other backend for services/data, how else will you scale up & down? You might either lose users or overpay your ISP/ for hardware. This is where Azure gives you on-demand elasticity so you pay for only what you consume.
• OData: Accept it .. we’ll live in a hybrid mobile platform world for a very long time. Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to re-invent your data access layer between iOS/Android/Windows Phone apps? Enter OData – the Open Data Protocol. Based on the simple premises of HTTP and Atom/JSon, OData acts an platform-independent data interchange protocol. Like RSS for real updateable data. And it comes with proxy-building libraries for various ecosystems. So, do once & apply to all platforms .. really. Check out details about OData on it’s home site or the many articles we’ve written up on Silverlightshow.
• CDNs: Yes, you can host your application backend with your local ISP or even under your desk. But if you are serving up imagery, maps, media or anything heavy, and you have users all over the world, our app will see lag. This is just because of the physics of delivering content across continents. Wouldn’t it be nice to serve up the content from some servers close to where the user is? Enter Azure Content Delivery Network .. an unique advantage of cloud infrastructure that includes edge cache nodes across the world. Your content essentially gets cached & Azure does the DNS magic to serve up requests closest to where the user of your app is. Very easy to set up & must-take-advantage of cloud computing. Learn more here & here.
• Azure WP7 Toolkit: To make it a little easier for Windows Phone developers to leverage Azure, the Azure DPE team has done a lot of work around toolkits & helper libraries. There are now Azure Toolkits for Windows Phone, iOS & Android. So, no matter what mobile platform you are building your apps in, it should be easy to leverage Azure, since these toolkits essentially abstract out some of the Azure intricacies for the mobile developer. The Azure Toolkit for WP7 (details here) has awesome templates which give you a great starting point if your Windows Phone app had to use SQL Azure, Tables, Blobs & Push Notifications from the cloud. Get the bits, start a New Project & hit F5!
• ACS, Notifications & Nugets: Is the full Azure Toolkit for WP7 too much for your scenario? Worry not, as MSFT has also released individual features as Nugets (details here), for easy consumption. Need to authenticate users to your app using federated identity from Google/Live/Faceboook etc? There is a Nuget that just does ACS (Access Control Service) through Azure .. this is superbly easy way to leverage the user’s existing identity by allowing Azure to act as a broker for tokens. Need to send out Push Notifications to your apps .. there is a Nuget for that too. So, grab what you need & fire away.
• Live APIs: Use SkyDrive? Yeah, who doesn’t like 25 Gigs of free cloud storage? Chances are your Windows Phone users with Live IDs already use SkyDrive. If you need to augment storage in your app & push something off to cloudverse, why the need to spin up storage yourself when there’s SkyDrive? MSFT recently opened up Live APIs & a SDK which give you secure access to user’s SkyDrive & much more through the Live Services suite. More details here, along with this article on how to leverage SkyDrive SDK from your Windows Phone App.
• Reuse: So, you know all about Push Notifications & the MSFT Push Notification Service (MPNS) for Windows Phone. Building Metro apps for Windows 8? Thankfully, the Push Notification architecture is quite similar & your knowledge/services could be easily leveraged. So, why not build one backend to feed both Windows Phone & Metro Apps? There is even a Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 (details here) to help you out.

Tell me I didn’t make my case? 🙂 So, go ahead .. give Azure a shot when it comes to building a supporting backend for your Windows Phone app. Off course, if it is viable & makes sense for your solution. Hopefully, you come back tomorrow for the Day #4 article in this series of “7 Deadly Sins for Windows Phone Developers!“.

Adios!