Windows Phone app development
Windows Phone Dev Center is the place to start.
Adding a new feature:
- Code.
- Test.
- Publish.
- Update the app's web page upon the certification.
- Update the help page accordingly.
- Add the announcement of new featurs as an entry in the announcement database table.
Nokia has been working very hard to help Windows Phone app developers who should all join its DVLUP.
Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows Phone can be quite problematic. A good alternative is Google Mobile Ads SDK. Windows may block Google's SDK dll file, so it needs to be unblocked to get rid of the error "A reference to a higher version or incompatible assembly cannot be added to the project" when adding GoogleAds.dll to references. One needs to use AdMob's new website to create ad units for Windows Phone 8 apps (the old site does not provide the function for WP8).
Windows Phone Toolkit has some controls that are quite useful. However Telerik WP controls can replace them. To add controls of Windows Phone Toolkit to the Toolbox of VS, one needs to browse to ...\WPtoolkit.4.2013.08.16\lib\sl4-windowsphone71\Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit.dll, however WP8 projects will actually use controls from ...\WPtoolkit.4.2013.08.16\wp8\Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit.dll
Emulator
Windows Phone emulators are fantastic - polished, fast and stable. Under some circumstances, it may have some problems with VirtualBox. Genymotion's Android emulators use VirtualBox. They can work side by side, but occasionally problems can occur. When this happens, rebooting the machine can solve this problem. Close VirtualBox apps such as Genymotion's Android emulators may also address the problem when a Windows Phone emulator has the following error messsage:
"The Windows Phone Emulator wasn't able to ensure the virtual machine was running:
Something happened while starting a vritual machine:
'Emulator xxx" could not initialize. (Virtual machine xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Not enough memeory in the system to start the virtual machine Emulator xxx with ram size 1024 megabytes. (Virtual machien ID xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Freeing the memory by closing some applications using a large amount of memory can solve this problem too.
IAP:
The WP IAP testing library is fantastic. One can simulate the entire purchasing process without dealing with things such as XML license files.
Media
MPEG-4 part 4 (MP4V-ES in RTSP) is not supported by Silverlight. It may not be supported by Windows.
WinRT is not necessarily better than Silverlight, especially for Windows Phone. For example, all classes of System.Windows.Media have been taken ouit including the extremely useful one - VideoSink. To produce a custom video sink with WinRT takes more than 100 times effort than with Silverlight. WinRT for WP also lacks the support for WCF services.
The only practical choice for an app to stream video from camera is Silverlight Windows Phone 8/8.1 app. First, Windows 7.x does not support listening to a port, so it would need a server for streaming. WinRT apps do not support VideoSink which is extrmemely useful for this kind of app. Therefore the app has to be Windows Phone 8 and it has to be Silverlight.