I am not too sure if this question is suited for this forum. If not, please let me know and I'll delete this.
I wanted to figure out the "easiest" way of keeping online score for a game or quiz on Windows Phone 7. Currently, I am not looking for things like Achievements etc. I know XBOX live provides a lot of stuff on these grounds, but it is not open for all.
I want to submit the score, and maintain the top 200 (may be less) odd scores. I am too lazy to write my own services and host it and go through the full maintenance cycle for that scoring system. Can someone point out some really good and easy to use + reliable services that I can use?
The product offered by Mogade has a lot of the features you have asked for:
Real time stats
Achievements
Logging
Javascript leaderboards & Facebook pages
Always free
No branding requirements
It's a very streamlined library where you only need to set up the bare essentials to get it working as all of the heavy lifting is managed for you automatically, allowing you to focus more time on the development of your game.
briansoli has written a fairly straightforward tutorial on how to get a leaderboard working with in a Windows Phone 7 game.
I hope you find this useful, let us know how you get on with it!
Microosft have just released a new toolkit called the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games. This should help you out with quite a bit.
Have a look at this Cloud Cover Show, Episode 52 - Tankster and the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games
The toolkit enables unique capabilities for social gaming prerequisites, such as storing user profiles, maintaining leader boards, in-app purchasing, and more. The toolkit also comes complete with reusable server side code and documentation, as well as Tankster, a new proof-of-concept game built with HTML5
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wanted to get started developing on the google play store or something similar (whatever is most profitable and most c# friendly, java worst case scenario) as I have made 2D games before and 1 and a bit 3D games, the problem is the signup fee, as I live in a 3rd world country and am still in high school $25 dollars is a lot of money to pay. I'm willing to do it once I've developed a game that's in a format compatible with google play, I don't know what languages or engine or file extensions are viable though.
A) What format/engine/language do they have to be in?
B) Are there C# compatible ones?
Any help apreciated.
Well since Google Play is for Android platforms I'm guessing they have to be in .apk which is Java (I'm afraid). There are some ways to compile C# code into .apk packages, but I think it's not as simple to do as it would be with Java. Check out http://xamarin.com/platform and see if it helps you in any way.
I have made one windows phone based application. i want some designing ideas from you wp7 people.how can we apply styles,transparent background or the design which suits wp7 app. may i have some links which provides snaps for good designed apps. please help
One app that jumps to my mind when talking about great use and adaption to the metro design, it's "Cocktail Flow". It has very well done implementations of many design cues for WP7. As special treats it has features like parallax effects controled via gyroscope.
You can find a free version on the marketplace. Definitely worth a look.
MSDN user experience guidelines are pretty good, User Experience Design Guidelines for Windows Phone.
Also, it helps to install some popular apps from the marketplace and study their design.
The BEST thing you can possibly do to get a good idea of how to build a great WP7 app is to own a Windows Phone, and use it as your primary phone.
Get used to the way the operating system flows. Download cool apps. As time goes on you begin to understand from the user's perspective what a "good" app looks (and more importantly) feels like. It's a hard thing to nail down in a "user experience" spec. I find that a lot of people who set off to build a WP7 app do so before understanding how apps are supposed to behave on the platform. It is vital that you understand how users expect applications on the windows phone to operate. If you use a windows phone for a good 3-4 months, and really make an effort of butting it through the steps, it will be hard to walk away from that experience without a very clear idea of what a "good" application looks like for the windows phone.
That being said, and while I honestly don't believe that there are any short cuts to good design for the windows phone, I highly recommend downloading the following apps, and playing around with them to get a feel for "good" UI:
Wordament
Cocktail Flow (previously mentioned)
Twitter
Spotify
Yelp
Any of the built in applications (Office, Zune, Internet Explorer)
The above are good to start with, but again, you're really not going to understand it unless you live and breath it everyday for at least a few months.
I'm looking to get a windows phone to use as a development platform. What should I consider when comparing models? I'm not interested in opinions about individual phones, but about what features I should make sure exist.
I would recommend one with gyroscope and front facing camera, to be able to test the features of the last WP7 handsets. But overall, it's pretty good to develop on the slowest phone you can find. This way, you make sure that your app will provide good user experience on pretty much all available devices.
We're working on the next version of a tracking system. The previous incarnation used an LCD with a simple custom UI however as we've had usability problems and we've found development time-consuming, and as our display is going out of production, we're considering using a regular cellphone or PDA as the interface instead.
Our main worry is whether we can keep such a product on the market for five to ten years without having to continually keep porting and adapting the application to new devices. To make things somewhat easier we intend to bundle the phones with the system, though in an ideal world our (largely non-technical) users would be able to use their own.
So, what's our best bet? Are there a good platform-independent libraries we can count on being supported for a while? Or are we better of betting on a single platform at a time? Perhaps backward-compatibility is more likely to be maintained on a PDA? Truth be told I'm not even sure what language to bet on for the generic parts of the code.
I'm also a little anxious about the link to our hardware. Bluetooth SPP is attractive since it's particularly easy to use and there are plenty of ready-made modules available, but support on the phone side is far from universal.
Any pragmatic advice would be most welcome as I must admit to having no experience with mobile application development.
If you don't control the entire production chain for hardware like Apple does for example, you have no chance on long term. Unless your product is really innovative and market wants it so much, or if you are playing on a market niche (healthcare for instance). My proposal would be to make a market study and check what your customer use as mobile devices first. You should choose one or two top platforms first, and gradually add new platforms if market asks. If you are in US probably iPhone, Android, RIM would be the top choices, in Europe I would have to choose between iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows. It's the same like developing a website you start with two top browsers and gradually add support for minor ones.
About portable libraries I wouldn't bet on this. Instead I would design an architecture using abstraction layers. For example I would have Bluetooth abstraction layer that would expose functionalities to my Business Logic Layer; underneath I would have BlueZ if I deploy on Android/Linux, maybe GameKit for iPhone, MS stack or Widcomm for Windows and so on.
PDAs are dead, actually they've merged into smartphones and tablets, they were an evolutionary step. So forget them.
HTML5 is a good idea but is only the front layer, you must deal also business logic and lower layers.
Bluetooth SPP is good because it is common, and interoperable it's like the webservices for enterprise. Instead of giving an API that is platform dependent you could provide a set of custom AT commands, that can be used by anyone that can connect on Bluetooth to SPP.
Cross platform sounds like HTML 5, CSS and Javascript, along with some javascript frameworks for mobile development like the ones listed here
What Windows Phone 7 demo/reference applications have you seen which really made you interested in developing for the platform?
I know of Scott Gu's Twitter example and Foursquare. Also see here for MIX10 demo apps.
Other than developing games and re-creating functionality already present on other mobile platforms (iPhone, BlackBerry, Android), is there any good reference material and business benefits of developing for Windows Phone 7? Does the Silverlight dev environment really offer an advantage over what is already out there? My gut feeling is that this is definitely the case, but it will take some time for the platform to establish itself, if it does.
You can find a lot of examples and reference applications here www.reddit.com/r/wp7dev/ or search using the hashtag #wp7dev on twitter (full disclosure - some of my examples appear there).
There a examples of what people are openly working on, but one can assume it is a lot more - hopefully this is useful, as it shows what can be done, or is being done on the platform.
As a novice developer, other phone platforms came with a lot of overhead required to build even the simplest application. The fact that XNA will be available for game development is a huge thing for me, it means I can create simple games for me and my friends without having to spend time learning a new language or setting up awkward SDK's and deployment settings.
More advanced developers may scoff at that, but development tools that are already being used that can work right out of the box for the intended platform is important for the hobbyists. I think this will open up a huge arena for homemade games and apps just like XNA did for 360 development.
It should also help sales. I will buy a Windows 7 phone because of this, and I can imagine others will do the same. As it stands, I am going to port my existing XNA games over so I can play them on the go. It will be cool to show people at the office, airport, etc. projects I have made right on the spot, and even give them the option to play if they have the right hardware.