Windows Mobile 7 - Development

Goksly · 27 Jul 2011 at 21:21

Looking for a bit of help and advice!

The company I work for is a Microsoft based company; 4 developers, various websites and 2 windows mobile 6.5 applications. We've just got word from our network that they are running low on the devices we use (HD2) and will not be able to swap them for the same devices when our contracts are up (we've got about 200 devices).

They have offers HTC Mozarts as replacements... which has led to a debate. I want to carry on with Microsoft and run with Windows Mobile 7, 1 of the other devs has suggested Android and the other 2 want to go with Apple (even though the 3 devs don't know that language?!).

Anyways, there argument against WM7 is that the market is only big enough for 2 platforms, with Android and Apple being those 2. Do you think there is any truth? I can't see Microsoft leaving such a lucrative market myself...

Also whats the first place to look for WM7? I've had a quick look and a bit confused... people talking about silverlight and then blend... I thought it was silverlight, so not sure where blend comes into it. Anyone shed any light?

Cheers!

RockLobster · 27 Jul 2011 at 22:21

I assume this is to sell an app on one of the market places? There are many Android devices being activated everyday. The problem Google has, because of how open the market is, people are not buying the apps like they do on Apple's store. I read somewhere that Apple managed over £1 billion in revenue through their app store last year and Google £60 million. Obviously Google are trying to tackle this. I'm not sure what will happen with Windows Mobile. I think it will succeed but may take Microsoft years. A similar situation to the Xbox franchise.

Goksly · 27 Jul 2011 at 22:26

No this is an in house development for our engineers... Just need to know if we go down the winmo7 route its not a dead end.

RockLobster · 27 Jul 2011 at 22:29

I assume you're all c# developers (.net) if that's the case I would go down the Windows mobile route. I think it will be to much hassle learning Objective-C, etc.

Goksly · 27 Jul 2011 at 22:35

That's my point of view... As I said just wanted to make sure its not a dead end and what we need to be looking at (i.e. not 100% what expression blend is etc).

Haircut · 28 Jul 2011 at 06:55

Goksly said:
That's my point of view... As I said just wanted to make sure its not a dead end and what we need to be looking at (i.e. not 100% what expression blend is etc).

Expression Blend is just a tool to help with the visual design when doing WPF/Silverlight development.
You can do everything in Visual Studio, but Blend makes a lot of things much easier.

GravyMonster · 28 Jul 2011 at 08:42

If it was my choice I'd choose Android or Apple. Probably Android, as Java isn't a world away from C#, and wouldn't mean learning an entirely new language.

While WM7 may be tempting due to ease of transition, it's not going anywhere. Microsoft make more money from Android than they do from sales of WM7 units, and I think it'll be a matter of months/a year before it either gets the can or they bring out something else entirely.

Xelene · 28 Jul 2011 at 11:19

If you are c# developers, go look at XNA. Personally, I think that WM7 is stillborn but Microsoft will have to throw money at it as the PC is rapidly becoming obsolete.

Goksly · 28 Jul 2011 at 11:57

Thought XNA was games development? We just need to get input etc to complete questionnaires / tasks etc.

Thanks for all the feedback so far guys.

Tilluss · 28 Jul 2011 at 11:58

If it's in house development for your (I'm guessing) site engineers then any of the platforms would be ok.

The pro's for WP7 is that it will be a familiar language. It's still a young OS but catching up quickly with updates like Mango on the way, so I would expect to see it increasing it's market share quite a bit over this next year once it gets some decent phones out to market. Microsoft isn't going to drop it any time soon and has embraced it's unique UI in windows 8. One thing you will have with WP7 over android is that they impose very strict hardware guidelines unlike android, so you will always know you will get a phone that is very capable. The tools for WP7 will be mostly familiar in visual studio, but blend is a different animal, but shouldn't take long to get your heads around, and they will all run on your existing hardware (although you will need DX10 graphics cards to run some of the animations in the simulator).

iOS is great in the respect that you only have to program for a small number of standard device shapes and sizes, the cons are that it's an entirely new language that can only be written on an entirely different platform. Granted Objective-c isn't a hard language to learn once you get your head around the quite alien syntax, it's still time out learning a new language that you could be applying to developing your application. To ease this the tools for iOS are getting better and better all the time with things like storyboarding getting added, but the problem is you need a mac running OSX to use these tools which is an investment your management will have to decide on.

Then we come to android, it's the most popular mobile OS out there at the moment, but the main reason for that is that every manufacturer and their dog can put it on whatever device that they want without restriction (within reason). It's language is Java which is quite similar to c# in a lot of respects, and it's tools (eclipse) can be used on any platform, but those tools that are built on top of eclipse suck compared to that of WP7 and iOS (from my experience anyway). The simulator is a native version of android running in some kind of visualization environment and takes a long time to boot if your not using a half ok PC unlike the iOS and WP7 simulators which boot in a few seconds. The advantage of android is that it wont take a lot of migration from one language to another and there are a lot of cheaper handsets out there and no existing hardware will need to be upgraded (unless you are running a machine with 1GB RAM and a super old CPU anyway).

So in summary; if your looking for the cheapest platform then Android is for you, if your looking for the least migration difficulties then WP7 should be your choice, but if your looking to develop for a small number of devices as possible with standards that aren't at risk of changing too dramatically AND don't mind investing in some new hardware, iOS is something you should be looking into.

[EDIT] Just saw that it's for questionnaires and tasks, does this mean you would be potentially looking at tablets too? If so only iOS and Android have tablet solutions available at the moment with WP7 versions coming out in the next year or so, just another thing to consider.

Xelene · 28 Jul 2011 at 13:16

Goksly said:
Thought XNA was games development? We just need to get input etc to complete questionnaires / tasks etc.

Thanks for all the feedback so far guys.

Just mentioned it as it adds the pipeline for deploying C# to WP7 into VS2010, the game stuff is just a bunch of API's you probably won't need. Whether that's something you can get elsewhere or not I have no idea.

Goksly · 29 Jul 2011 at 19:17

Thanks again guys... And yes the tablets are another avenue which the company will want to go down. Will take on board the info you've all provided... Really think wp7 is what we need.