Writing my first Windows Phone app (I hope!)

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As an IT Evangelist, I like to make fun of developers from time to time. We live in different worlds and do different things. There has always been an imaginary wall between the IT and Dev departments with only a few daring individuals willing (or forced) to have feet on both sides.

I used to be a “developer”…..in 1982.

Back in those days I wrote a myriad of very tiny apps for my Apple ][. I then moved on to writing apps on my Apple //gs. By the mid-80’s I had pretty much stopped any real coding and instead adapted existing applications in a few different proprietary programming languages. In 1994, I made the jump to the IBM PC world and I really haven’t looked back. I also gave up any real coding outside of working with batch files. I don’t even do much with PowerShell unless I really have to. 

Now that it is 2012 and handheld computing is all the rage, I have a few ideas I have been sitting on that I would like to implement. They are basic “query a database, does it exist? if yes – display the results / if no – return a blank” kind of apps. I hope I am capable of doing even that much still.

Download the tools

To get myself started, I am in the process right now of downloading the FREE Windows Phone Developer tools at the App Hub. I have some data I am going to drop into a local SQL Server, get the data moved over to SQL Azure, then start writing my app to make queries against it. I may even try to write up a data entry tool that allows me to add/modify the existing data in the SQL Azure instance. but for now I just want to query against it.

As I make progress, I will post here. I may even enlist the help of some the great Developer Evangelists you now see in a blog roll on the right side of my blog. I don’t know if they will help me thought because I think I have told all of them the same developer joke several times now.

“You don’t write code!  You just type a few letters, press tab a few times until all of the text is the right color, then press enter….”

I should probably respect what they do a little more….

 

Cheers!