Thursday, July 19, 2012

Progress

Things are beginning to come together a bit more now.

Working with a flying buddy to define and develop an avionics tool for Windows Phone 7, although it's moving the right direction I think it'll probably take 3-4 months to create v1. Flight planning and avionics integration for light aircraft such as hang-gliders isn't your average topic so I'm glad I've got Nick to help me understand it.

Toying with WCF RESTful services and some JSON clients this afternoon - Although I've got 2008 R2 running in some VirtualBox clients it's really just a simulation for cloud storage and SaaS. If I can work out whether there's actually any point to doing it; I don't think the weather and flight planning features should be restricted by device storage / capacity.

My knowledge experts fleshing out some more ideas from the prototype I sent him. We currently have techo-joy: Using my Nokia WP to edit Office docs on the fly, SkyDrive hosting the storage so that we're sharing the same OneNote notebooks for the brainstorming and storyboards. I've got him to install MS Expression Blend 4 so he can get involved with the prototyping a little.

Looking at my Microsoft subscription, I still can't believe they're offering you the choice of either Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure. I keep getting more and more impressed with their products and direction; .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 look like great productivity tools for developers and architects alike. After looking at the Windows 8 preview I can't wait for the WP 8 SDK and associated tools to come out.

It's just such a shame there hasn't been the market take up of this third ecosystem in the mobile market - For business purposes nothing else I've seen comes close. If Surface and W8 support the same app framework as WP 8 it's going to be very easy to port software between device platforms. Just look at WP7 apps, Windows 8's likely technical direction and existing PC applications like Zune. All appear to run from the same platform which could mean that we're about to see realistic convergence of development environments and even underlying platforms.

It's amazing how quickly you can get distracted working at home though. For example, whilst writing this blog post I had a sudden urge to see what amazing beards are out there on the internet.


News beard Hunter beard Tolkien beard

N.B. I have nothing against beards or 'taches, it was just a distraction from problems with the WP emulator load sequence.