Why the Lumia 800 is the first device I would switch to from an iPhone

Re:Why the Lumia 800 is the first device I would switch to f... by polyfractal on Monday November 14, 2011 @09:21AM (#3234006)

I have a love-hate relationship with WP7 development.

On one hand, we have Visual Studio, a built in phone emulator, the .Net platform and excellent documentation/tutorials. It's almost stupid how easily you can create fairly advanced "form based" applications with WPF. Games are fairly straightforward with XNA. The build in emulator works with VS like a dream, dropping in and out of breakpoints, etc.

I could gush all day about the development environment.

However, App Hub (the place to actually publish your app) is an absolute nightmare. Built entirely in Silverlight, it is buggy, clunky and unintuitive. There is basically zero documentation, descriptions are vague or just wrong. Stats about your app are at least a week delayed and are not detailed. You can only see reviews for your app in your local market (e.g. US market). My app has a few reviews from England, but I have to use a third party tool to view them.

I could rant all day about App Hub.

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Re:Why the Lumia 800 is the first device I would switch to f... by zwigby on Monday November 14, 2011 @01:44PM (#3235117)

From my experience with iPhone and iTunes connect (also not a great application) I don't spend a lot of time in iTunes Connect. Are you spending a lot of time in the App Hub? What I'm getting at is that this sounds like a pretty minor thing in the grand scheme.

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Re:Why the Lumia 800 is the first device I would switch to f... by polyfractal on Monday November 14, 2011 @02:07PM (#3235213)

Oh, I agree entirely. The benefits of the excellent development environment completely overshadow the poor App Hub experience.

And once you're at the point where you are submitting an app, you are already committed. The poor experience won't stop you from submitting, and probably won't stop you from developing another app.

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Re:Why the Lumia 800 is the first device I would switch to f... by barend on Monday November 14, 2011 @09:30AM (#3234053)

The app hub problems you describe are fixable. Did you relay your issues to Microsoft?

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Re:Why the Lumia 800 is the first device I would switch to f... by polyfractal on Monday November 14, 2011 @10:47AM (#3234387)

I have and so have a lot of other developers.

To be fair, they did a major overhaul of the App Hub just prior to Mango which corrected a number of other issues. It just seems to take them a long time to correct what should be obvious issues or usability problems.

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