Microsoft pays a visit to Richmond Mobile Monday

ICF-Ironworks plays host to the Richmond chapter of the Mobile Monday Meetup Group.  The group meets about once a month and usually includes a guest speaker or discussion topic related in some way to the emerging world of mobile technologies.  The 2013 edition of Mobile Monday kicked off on January 14 with a presentation from G. Andrew Duthie, Microsoft Technical Evangelist (@devhammer).

Andrew shared some cool features about Windows 8 Mobile devices and developing native applications for the like; I’ll talk about 3 of them here today…

Did you know that you can hook your Xbox 360 controller up to the surface to play games right out of the box?!  Neither did I, this is definitely a cool feature, especially with the highest-grossing types of native applications being games (appdata.com). 

Windows 8 Mobile applications are developed using Visual Studio 2012, which means .NET, HTML 5, CSS3, JavaScript, Jquery, etc.  This is great because most development shops already have the
expertise to build windows 8 mobile native apps.  Side Note:  Visual Studio allows you to wirelessly debug applications running on a Windows 8 mobile device from your development machine (stackoverflow.com)!

My biggest complaint about native mobile apps is that they can’t share data with each other.  Not so with Windows 8.  The new framework includes a feature called contracts, where the developer can enable native applications to share data with other applications via a basic data store that is brokered by the O/S (codeproject.com)

There you have it; three really good reasons to check out Windows 8 and Windows 8 Mobile devices.

Comments

[mobile app development company]

Hooking up the Xbox 360 controller with the Windows 8 Mobile devices is definitely a cool feature, especially with the highest-grossing types of native applications being games.