I attended a presentation at GLUG.net East Lansing & Flint last night on the Seven Deadly Sins for Windows Phone Developers presented by Samidip Basu. Thank you GLUG.net and Samidip for the great introduction to Windows Phone development.
Windows Phone 7 has some really great features. If you are a .Net developer, it doesn't take much to build a WP7 application. But that's not what blew my mind last night.
It's all about the infrastructure!
I've been teaching myself hybrid phone development for a couple of months. Since I cannot learn everything at once, I've focused on the phone application itself. I really want to have a single code base that is cross platform so I've been looking at hybrid development with PhoneGap. I know that eventually I'll bump into limitations this way and end up writing native applications. But you've got to start somewhere.
The throw-away application I'm using to learn is an "X Shop" application (where X is a coffee shop, pizza store, bakery, ...). It would give customers a mobile app to view the shop menu, select favorites, and place orders. The shop owner could push information like the coffee flavor of the day or other promotions to the customer. While brainstorming the features I'd like, I've started to consider how I'm going to implement the needed infrastructure for these features. Eventually, the mobile app would need to be part of an integrated solution. I think my code base just grew rather large.
The actual phone application has become the easiest piece of the puzzle. How am I going to interface with the point of sale application? Should I offer one? What about inventory?
Microsoft has created a really great enterprise infrastructure behind their phone. In future posts, I'll flesh out how this can be used to support my "throw-away" coffee shop experiment.
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