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Leaving Windows Phone 7 to Return to Android

robpaveza.net

11–19 of 19 posts

Re: Leaving Windows Phone 7 to Return to Android

#11

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.

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 wind…

That's about how it is on Android. Maybe more than 2 seconds, though. 3? 5? Something like that.

Re: Leaving Windows Phone 7 to Return to Android

#12

> If I call a local number by only using its seven-digit number, WP7 never, ever figured out to map it to the relevant contact. My old Motorola RAZR phones did that. What part of the country still allows 7 digit dialing?

I suppose a cellphone might recognize a 7-digit number and prepend the phone's own area code. A landline can't do that, of course.

Re: Leaving Windows Phone 7 to Return to Android

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wind…

That's about how it is on Android. Maybe more than 2 seconds, though. 3? 5? Something like that.

OK, cool. The shorter time is probably just because I only ever got as far as writing toy apps.

Re: Leaving Windows Phone 7 to Return to Android

#14
post #3
post #2

He clearly used Android first. WP7 tries to put everything right in front of you, and reserve menus and tap-and-hold for rarely used operations (like delete). Not to say there aren't problems with Windows Phone 7 right now, but: > On the call history screen, if I tap-and-hold a phone number, Windows Phone gives me: Delete However, if instead you tap the number itself (and don't hold), you get the full contact (should…

Related to the hardware buttons complaint...that's maybe relevant for HTC phones. LG, for instance, has REAL buttons not those touch sensitive crap and you really can't press those by mistake.

afaik all the consensus "good" Windows phones (HD7, Focus, Venue Pro) have touch buttons, though. They don't totally ruin the experience, but it's really annoying that they'd do something so dumb as to squander much of the advantage of having a hardware button to begin with. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Re: Leaving Windows Phone 7 to Return to Android

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wind…

That's about how it is on Android. Maybe more than 2 seconds, though. 3? 5? Something like that.

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...

Re: Leaving Windows Phone 7 to Return to Android

#16

"HTTP is an abstraction of Berkeley Sockets." Wait, what? HTTP is a protocol that can run on Berkeley sockets, certainly.

People still call them "Berkley sockets"? Isn't that akin to calling your "Von-Neumann Machine" something like "Turing complete"?

Re: Leaving Windows Phone 7 to Return to Android

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's about how it is on Android. Maybe more than 2 seconds, though. 3? 5? Something like that.

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...

Debugging on the actual device is a much, much better experience than debugging on the emulator.

Re: Leaving Windows Phone 7 to Return to Android

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Debugging on the actual device is a much, much better experience than debugging on the emulator.

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.

Re: Leaving Windows Phone 7 to Return to Android

#19

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.

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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