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by sad_hacker 5564 days ago
Best thing about WP7 (for me) are the tools that they provide to developers. Visual Studio (Phone) compared to Eclipse for Android is so much better. The IDE itself and also debugging. Using eclipse after is like doing a brain surgery through arse. I use and develop for Android, but once I tried WP7 tools I got very jealous.
2 comments
contextfree 5564 days ago
What is the deployment and debugging experience like on Android or iOS? I was impressed with the Visual Studio integration when I played with WP7 development a bit - you can just hit F5 and your app starts up on the phone in debug mode in, like, two seconds, and you can then step through it in Visual Studio, set breakpoints, hover over variables to see their values, and even evaluate expressions in the immediate window.

I was vaguely expecting some cumbersome deployment process, but it feels no heavier than running something on the PC. But I've never developed for other mobile platforms, so maybe this is just standard?

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metageek 5564 days ago
That's about how it is on Android. Maybe more than 2 seconds, though. 3? 5? Something like that.
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sad_hacker 5564 days ago
With WM 3 seconds? It takes only to boot up 3-4 minutes. Emulator is painfully slow. Whole internet is full of complaints about it...
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contextfree 5564 days ago
Debugging on the actual device is a much, much better experience than debugging on the emulator.
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sad_hacker 5564 days ago
I agree. I'm doing it myself also, otherwise it would be impossible to develop for android. But you need to test your application on different screen sizes, dpi etc. Or you can buy loads of different phones to test on them all.
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contextfree 5564 days ago
OK, cool. The shorter time is probably just because I only ever got as far as writing toy apps.
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MatthewPhillips 5564 days ago
WP7 sdk has some major holes though. For one thing, no native way to store user data. You can either use a simple key/value thing (only good for settings data) or you can use files. What I wound up doing was creating XML files that I serialized and deserialized as needed to store data. Not exactly a good solution as the data scales.
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