Contents tagged with General Software Development
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Multiple Apps, One Azure Mobile Service
“Multiple Windows 8 apps, can they share the same Azure Mobile Services backend?”
This was the question I was looking to answer this week. I did the prerequisite search of the interwebs and found that this question has been floating around for a while now. What I didn’t find was a definitive answer. Let’s start off by solving that problem:
YES
Okay, with that out of the way I need to add a bit of a caveat:
MOSTLY
Let me explain
Yes…Mostly?
There are multiple scenarios that...
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Location, Location, Awesome Geo-Location
I’ve been publicly building an application called RMV Awesome for the last several months on this blog. Since the initial release of the Windows 8.1 app we’ve migrated code to a Portable Class Library, ported to Windows Phone 8, added monetization and integrated Azure Mobile Services. Next we’ll tackle geo-location.
Since RMV Awesome is all about wait-times at various branches around Massachusetts, location is a logical feature. It makes a lot more sense to order the branch list based on distance...
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Awesome Azure Mobile Services
I love talking about Azure Mobile Services. It is one of those services that developers are always shocked is available from Microsoft. Why shocked? Well, Azure Mobile Services is a fully-baked backend for apps that delivers data storage, custom API's, scheduled jobs, authentication (Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and Google) and push notifications. Further more, it is truly cross-platform with SDKs available for Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS, Android, Xamarin and Unity 3D. Oh, and did I forgot to mention that the pricing...
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Monetizing RMV Awesome!
NOTE: This is part of a series covering Windows Client development. Our sample application is RMV Awesome, an ironically named Modern UI application for keeping tabs on the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. In this article we'll look at monetizing our creation.
Now that we have our Awesome app on both Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8 we should consider monetization. Monetization is the marketer's term for "make money with this thing". Money? Money sounds good, let's do that.
Disclaimer: Monetization is...
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Monetizing Apps
Monetization is one of the most important and confounding choices a developer has to make. I spend most of my day working with developers and organizations building commercial software. App monetization is one of those topics that seems to come up fairly regularly.
The art of monetization lies in striking the right balance between the app's perceived value and the customer's cost (in money, time or effort). The rub of course is that both the perceived value and the customer's cost are...
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The Magic of Font Icons
With the release of Windows 8.1 came a little noticed addition to XAML called FontIcon. It is a rather simple XAML tag designed to show a glyph from a specified font. At the same time came two other tags in a similar vain (SymbolIcon which shows a glyph from Segoe UI and PathIcon which displays a path).
On it's own, FontIcon isn't extremely useful. Most of the basic glyphs are already part of Segoe UI and most of the other symbol fonts...
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Moving to Windows Phone 8
NOTE: This is part of a series covering Windows Client development. Our sample application is RMV Awesome, an awesomely named Modern UI application for keeping tabs on the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles wait times. In this article we'll bring our sample application to Windows Phone 8.
Although both Windows and Windows Phone share a large number of concepts and components, they are still distinct platforms. There are a number of subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) differences in how each platform implements...
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Leveraging Portable Class Libraries
NOTE: This is part of a series covering Windows Client development. Our sample application is RMV Awesome, an ironically named Modern UI application for keeping tabs on the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. In this article we'll take a step towards Windows Phone by introducing Portable Class Libraries.
On the path towards Windows Phone we must first stop off in the land of Portable Class Libraries or PCLs. In many was a PCL is just like any other Library, it holds...
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Renaming a Windows 8.1 App
One of the often overlooked improvements for the Windows Store in Windows 8.1 answers one of the more common questions I'm asked by developers.
Previously the name you reserved for your app was someone permanent. Sure, you could rename your app but it required republishing your app under the new name and delisting your old one. The downside of this was that your existing users had no idea and therefore ended up orphaned from future upgrades.
With 8.1 you can now rename...
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Image Importer
I recently published an app for Windows 8.1 for importing photos. Image Importer provides an enhanced photo importation over the default Photos app. Specifically it adds two features previously available in Windows Essentials Live Gallery - the ability to import files into folders by Date Taken and remove files from the source media when completed. I developed this utility for my personal use but decided to publish it after hearing other's in the community looking for these features.
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