If you couldn’t make it to the developer prenote, here’s what you missed. A video of local developers having successes was shown, highlighting the creators of apps like Tweetro who have racked up more than 100,000 downloads before Windows 8 even launches. The video was first shown at TechEd New Zealand. Andrew Coates then took the stage to drop up excitement with developers by promoting the opportunities afforded by sharing the same space with smart people for the next week. Events like this are all about networking.
As discussed in our earlier post today, Coates went onto promote the ‘Only write the code that only you can write’ message. Re-iterating that you should leverage assets and code that are publically available and not waste time building the frameworks.
Windows Azure Mobile Services was shown off by Nick Harris. This is designed to allow mobile app developers to easily connect to a backend data source using Windows Azure and SQL Azure. The demo made the process look incredibly simple for developers to use.
Chris Birmele was on hand to show developers a Microsoft way of handling source control. Team Foundation Services on Azure is a hosted source code management solution. Right now it is free, but will become a charged service at a later date. A new feature of TFS on Azure is Auto deploy on Check-in. While that may be a scary concept for some, for those who regularly do this workflow manually, it’s a massive time saver.
Coates then gave a quick demo of Visual Studio Lightswitch which is a tool that’s been around for a while now, but has some new tricks. It’s designed to allow IT Pros (read not developers) to create apps that display data without knowing code.
The event then tuned to Nick Hodge who showcased a Windows 8 app he built in around 3 days which displays a library of book titles. He went on to announce a competition, for every TechEd attendee that builds 3 apps before a specified date, you are in the running for some prizes, details at – http://w8.msdeveloper.com.au
Dave Glover followed with a Windows Phone application leveraging the same web services from earlier demos. He encouraged the room to visit http://wp.msdeveloper.com.au which allows you to get loan phones, developer tokens and a whole lot more goodness.
You can see plenty of photos from the developer prenote on Flickr.
One of the most interesting parts of the prenote was a demo of a touch-only IDE for Windows Phone. You can check it out at http://touchdevelop.com
