The first Ukrainian application on the Windows Store
On March 28, the first application, written by Ukrainian developers under Windows 8 - Euro Cup 2012, was released . The application is the first Ukrainian application in the Windows Store. The developer of the application has become the company Digital Cloud Technologies .
I am one of the developers of this application and I want to tell a little about the process of its creation, about the problems that arose during its release.
The team consisted of 5 developers under the leadership of Sergey Luta - MVP Silverlight, co-author of the world's first book on developing C # under Windows 8 and Denis Reznik MVP SQL Server.
The developers had no experience with the platform, with the exception of the courses held by Microsoft in Moscow, in which some of us were fortunate enough to participate. The application architecture is based on the MVVM pattern — it helped us a lot, but it also caused several serious problems.
We started the development of the application on the version of Windows 8 Developer Preview.
At that time only VS 2011 Express, forum and MSDN were available. At that moment, we were happy to see a notice of missing information: “This material is not yet available. This is the placeholder of the release. ” This inscription instilled in us a sense of pioneering and added an irresistible desire to achieve the desired result. All this made us act intuitively, by trial and error, which in turn slowed down the development process. By the way, at that time Expression Blend supported only html / js projects, and the designer’s function in the studio was terribly slow, and sometimes it just hung ...
On February 28, a new version of Windows 8 Consumer Preview was released, where the studio's performance improved markedly and, in general, “breathing easier” :). The new version of Windows 8 brought with it changes to the .NET API for Metro applications, where they renamed some classes, changed methods ... I had to transfer the application to a new version.
One of the obstacles in the further development was the error " Fatal Error ". Which fell in unpredictable places, about which a couple of topics were brought up at the developers forum at that time with possible guesses about its solution. Moderators promised to fix the bug in the next update. I had to spend a lot of effort to track it. In our case, and in most of the cases described on the forum, the error was in using the static resources of the application.
Despite all the inconveniences, we found a solution - we debugged and prepared an application to run on the Windows Store and for the start of the MSSWIT conference. Wolfgang Ebermann, Vice-President of the European headquarters of Microsoft, showed our application in his presentation at the opening of the conference.
We all got a lot of fun, solving new problems and understanding unexpected problems. The stable version of the application is now in the Windows Store. Application development continues, and in the future we will present you a new version of the application.
')
Finally, a little about the API itself. The guys from Microsoft did a really great job. The usual file selection or streaming scripts are simple to write, and platform integration, as an example, the implementation of searching or sharing of data is implemented in just a couple of lines of code. The functionality of classes and methods is so intuitive that the average programmer practically does not have to scour the forums or spend time on MSDN reading the description of each class. As for newcomers to the .NET Framework or XAML - development, MSDN contains many "guides" on the implementation of a particular functionality, plus an infinite number of examples.
Personally, I am glad that I was lucky enough to take part in this project, it was an excellent experience with the new API.
PS In step with the times, along with Win8 and Metro Apps.
If you have any questions regarding the implementation of any part of the solution, I will be happy to answer them!
Oleg Vinnikov - Metro Style Application developer in Digital Cloud Technologies .
Euro Cup 2012 app video review:
I am one of the developers of this application and I want to tell a little about the process of its creation, about the problems that arose during its release.
The team consisted of 5 developers under the leadership of Sergey Luta - MVP Silverlight, co-author of the world's first book on developing C # under Windows 8 and Denis Reznik MVP SQL Server.
The developers had no experience with the platform, with the exception of the courses held by Microsoft in Moscow, in which some of us were fortunate enough to participate. The application architecture is based on the MVVM pattern — it helped us a lot, but it also caused several serious problems.
We started the development of the application on the version of Windows 8 Developer Preview.
At that time only VS 2011 Express, forum and MSDN were available. At that moment, we were happy to see a notice of missing information: “This material is not yet available. This is the placeholder of the release. ” This inscription instilled in us a sense of pioneering and added an irresistible desire to achieve the desired result. All this made us act intuitively, by trial and error, which in turn slowed down the development process. By the way, at that time Expression Blend supported only html / js projects, and the designer’s function in the studio was terribly slow, and sometimes it just hung ...
On February 28, a new version of Windows 8 Consumer Preview was released, where the studio's performance improved markedly and, in general, “breathing easier” :). The new version of Windows 8 brought with it changes to the .NET API for Metro applications, where they renamed some classes, changed methods ... I had to transfer the application to a new version.
One of the obstacles in the further development was the error " Fatal Error ". Which fell in unpredictable places, about which a couple of topics were brought up at the developers forum at that time with possible guesses about its solution. Moderators promised to fix the bug in the next update. I had to spend a lot of effort to track it. In our case, and in most of the cases described on the forum, the error was in using the static resources of the application.
Despite all the inconveniences, we found a solution - we debugged and prepared an application to run on the Windows Store and for the start of the MSSWIT conference. Wolfgang Ebermann, Vice-President of the European headquarters of Microsoft, showed our application in his presentation at the opening of the conference.
We all got a lot of fun, solving new problems and understanding unexpected problems. The stable version of the application is now in the Windows Store. Application development continues, and in the future we will present you a new version of the application.
')
Finally, a little about the API itself. The guys from Microsoft did a really great job. The usual file selection or streaming scripts are simple to write, and platform integration, as an example, the implementation of searching or sharing of data is implemented in just a couple of lines of code. The functionality of classes and methods is so intuitive that the average programmer practically does not have to scour the forums or spend time on MSDN reading the description of each class. As for newcomers to the .NET Framework or XAML - development, MSDN contains many "guides" on the implementation of a particular functionality, plus an infinite number of examples.
Personally, I am glad that I was lucky enough to take part in this project, it was an excellent experience with the new API.
PS In step with the times, along with Win8 and Metro Apps.
If you have any questions regarding the implementation of any part of the solution, I will be happy to answer them!
Oleg Vinnikov - Metro Style Application developer in Digital Cloud Technologies .
Euro Cup 2012 app video review:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/141401/
All Articles