Artificial ignorance

As you may know, we recently announced the April Refresh of the Windows Phone 7 developer tools. We’ve made some changes to some our APIs, including the way our Push Notifications work.

A few things you need to be aware of with the new tools and code for Push Notifications in WP7:

1. In your WP7 application’s WMAppManifest.xml file, ensure you have listed out the capabilities that your application will be utilizing. In this case, for your application to support Push Notifications, at the least you’d need to add the following to your WMAppManifest.xml:

<Capabilities>
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_NETWORKING" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_PUSH_NOTIFICATION" />
</Capabilities> Continue reading

[Update: The source code for the app is now available on Codeplex: http://4square.codeplex.com]

Foursquare is one of the leading location aware applications out there today with a rapidly growing user base. They’re really hot right now – they exploded dramatically at SXSW this year. We take it for granted when things “just work” – I can’t recall Foursquare having any kind of downtime at SXSW in spite of the explosive usage they saw that week and this is a huge testament to their dev team that managed the required scale so well.

Some of you may have seen the Foursquare Windows Phone 7 app that was demo’d on stage at MIX last week. The app looks amazing and “critics agree” ;) Continue reading

Some time back the team and I talked about our commitment to the Silverlight and XNA platforms on Windows Phone 7 Series as the primary developer platforms. We also promised to go into more detail about these platforms at MIX.

Not to oversimplify things, but, you can think about creating an application using the following iterative process:

While I can’t help you a whole lot with the ideation, I want to drill into a little more detail about how you can Design, Develop and Test your app, and eventually Distribute and Monetize your Windows Phone 7 app. The easiest way to think about how to design and develop for Windows Phone 7 Series is to break it down in to the platform piece and the tools piece. Continue reading