I have a Windows Phone 7 app to develop as a pet project and was going to get a phone just for testing my application. The app doesn't require calling features, so I was wondering if it would make more sense to get a Zune HD instead of the phone (trying to avoid paying monthly service fees).
In short, how close are the Zune HD and a windows phone 7 for testing simple "lob" type applications that would ultimately be sold as a windows phone 7 app?
This won't work since the apps need to run on the Phone O/S, which does not run on Zune devices. Nice idea though.
The Zune HD is a much slower processor than the Windows Phone 7 CPUs. The Zune HD runs at 600 mHz whereas the Windows Phone 7 devices all run at a gigahertz.
It's also not running the right operating system.
You might be able to test the games on the Zune HD. It uses XNA as does the Phone. The speeds (as above) would be different, but in theory this would work.
One can hope that perhaps a Zune HD2 might be in the works.
Related
I'm trying to test a website using Windows 10's touchscreen gestures. We don't actually have a Windows 10 device with a touchscreen, but www.browserstack.com and www.saucelabs.com/ do not have this option.
What's the right way to test via Windows 10 touchscreen, short of actually buying a Windows 10 device with a touchscreen?
While SauceLabs do provide real devices they rely on Appium to interact with the devices.
Microsoft have released a windows hardware lab kit ("Windows HLK").
There is more documentation here.
This appears to the "right" way perform this testing.
I use Mac OSX. I now want to try and develop an app on windows 8 for the Imagine Cup.
But i dont want to switch back to windows.
Is there any way to develop apps for windows 8 from mac?
Preferably free option....
The only available way is to use Virtual Machine because one cannot develop Windows 8 Modern UI app(Windows Store app) even with lower version of windows than windows 8. There are many virtual machines are available for free. Virtualbox maybe a good start.
www.techspot.com/guides/503-windows-8-virtual-machine ,A Tutorial to create vm of windows 8.
Assuming that windows phone is the platform you chose to develop app, again you need windows to create windows phone app.
Kick start your windows phone app development here .
I actually use VMWare on a Mac to do all of my Win32 development on Windows 7 and VS2010.
You will need:
a powerful mac (i7)
lots of RAM (I have 8G, I wish I had 16G)
a 7200rpm HDD or SSD.
With that, it's really great for me. I've been doing this for a few months now without a single kernel panic or blue screen at all.
Note: You cannot really develop for WP7 using this sort of configuration. The WP7 simulator uses VirtualBox, which either runs extremely slowly or not at all in other VMs, based on our experience. Will need a real Windows machine for that ^_^
It's a workable scenario. Good luck!
I want to develop app for windows phone but I got a big problem, my laptop can't run the emulator, after checking the requirements I know that my vga driver doesn't support it. My question is, are there any alternative for windows phone emulator instead of the officially one from Microsoft? Or any other way to tweak it to be run on my laptop? Thanks
From my understanding there isn't any other windows phone emulators. If you can get a hold of a windows phone 7 it would be possible to test on that. You can try to contact a Microsoft windows phone evangelist in your area, the one in my area helped me get a phone to test on.
I am not sure about tweakinging your laptop to get the emulator to work. Is your vga driver up to date? If not maybe try to update it. I know it takes quite a bit of computer power to run the emulator smoothly.
If you wanted you can try to register for a virtual lab, here you remote into a windows machine and are able to build and test on the remote machine, but it is time limted and is usually for a class to learn about it. https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032485600&%3bculture=en-US
I have been long interested to develop on the platform. I even got the tools installed already on my desktop but I can't upgrade my WDDM from 1.0 to 1.1. To make things simple: my graphics chips are not up to the task of running the emulator.
If I still buy a Windows Phone (e.g. a Nokia Lumia) for development purposes, can I sideload and test my apps there efficiently instead of going against the emulator?
If I still buy a Windows Phone (e.g. a Nokia Lumia) for development purposes, can I sideload and test my apps there efficiently instead of going against the emulator
Yes, of course. It's very easy and convenient. You have debugger and all the goodies. Advantage of the emulator is the test option for 256MB devices.
That's exactly what I used to do prior to upgrading my devstation. The nominal min spec says 3G but with a real phone it worked fine in 2G and as you say this also sorts out graphics limitations.
Note that the setting for whether the emulator or physical device is used is stored in the project, so if you accept a project from someone else you will have to set it once prior to debugging.
Well there are 2 sides of the coin. With the physical device you can test most of the things, but with a few limitations
You will not be able to test internet related test cases - For example, if you have an app which uses internet connectivity then you will not be able to test it on the device easily because
The device does not use the machine internet connectivity
When connected to the PC the device's internet connectivity(Data connection 3G/ wifi/GPRS) is broken.
You will have to purchase an account right from the first day you want to test your app. If you have the emulator working then you could postpone this for atleast few days.
I am fairly new at windows 7 graphics creation. My understanding is that all Windows phone 7 and Windows tablet graphics should be created at 96 ppi, not 72 like iPhone and android. Is this correct?
The sample graphics from windows and also another icon pack seem to support this idea as does this article (even though it's older):
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/expression/archive/2007/10/31/trick-or-treat-resolution-96-ppi.aspx
Before moving forward, I just want to make sure I don't have any wrong ideas about Windows phone/tablet graphics.
Thanks in advance for any responses!
Sticking to 96dpi shouldn't give you any problems on Windows or Windows Phone 7.
While not a wrong idea about graphics you do potentially have a wrong idea about Windows Phone (7) being comparable to a tablet:
Widnows Phone 7.0 (& 7.1) OS(es) are not and will never be tablet operating systems. All existing Windows based devices which are advertised as "tablets" either run a version of Windows (XP, Vista or 7) or are based on Windows CE.
If you try and create images which you can use across all of them without modification you are likely to run into issues.