My first Windows Phone 7 application – “My NEWS” published in WP7 Marketplace

“My NEWS” published in WP7 Marketplace

As part of my spare time over last few weekends, I was kind of trying to develop a Windows Phone 7 application in Silverlight for Mobile. It’s been published to Windows Phone Marketplace last week.

was kind of interested in developing some smartphone app in iPhone, so, I installed Apple Mac Leopard OS few months back, tried a simple app, but I didn’t released it to iOS marketplace, as there were lots of similar apps. Now, as Windows Phone 7 is very new, not many are out there, though every month 1000 app’s are getting published, aprox. 100 app’s per day, still it’s in initial stage, kind of crawling, compared to Android and iOS applications. So, I’ve developed in WP7 using Silverlight for mobile. One more reason is I’ve a solid background in Silverlight, as I’ve proposed and implemented large LOB applications for few of our clients.

This application is a Simple NEWS Application, developed with simple controls and the unique Panoramic controls (new to WP7) for rich feel/usability. I’ve used C# as the code, implemented MVVM pattern (sort of) for this. I also took help from my brother a lot, in creating the background images and loader image in the beginning and even few Silverlight screen designs. He’s a very good Web Designer/Developer, running a Web Design/Web Hosting/Domain Registration company in India called JiNiom and he’s few websites to promote them, viz.,http://NagariDomain.com (for .com/.net registration), http://NagariDomain.in (for Asia specific domains) and http://NagariDomain.us (for purchasing in USD).

Here is a link to the application in Bing Visual Search page - http://www.bing.com/browse?g=wp7&qpvt=Windows+Phone+7+Apps#toc=0&categories_rbid=9&r=81

Here is the link in Microsoft Zune (opens in Zune) -http://redirect.zune.net/External/LaunchZuneProtocol.aspx?pathuri=navigate%3FphoneAppID%3D6bc90b67-9840-e011-854c-00237de2db9e

This “My NEWS” application is a simple news reading application, to start with, it’s for non-geek users, who’re not that much aware of RSS/Atom stuff. Just hit different sources, and it’ll kind of aggregate the news from various sources in the background, consolidate and remove the duplicates, show the result as title of the news, links with brief info.

In case you’ve a Windows Phone 7 (my wife has one), you can try this app. It’s free (without Ads’). Please let me know your comments, my brother will be doing further improvements to this application going forward in managing this.

I’ll try write in a detailed post on how much easier it was to develop in Silverlight for mobile and WP7.

What Next: Planning to develop/guide my brother to develop a Windows Azure based WP7 application.

Disclaimer: As I’m an employee of Wipro, I’ve released this app as part of my brother’s company name, JiNiom, as he’s done lot of work including designing some screen in Silverlight. Also, another reason is I’m not sure whether I can personally publish app’s to Windows Marketplace, even though Microsoft itself is allowing / encouraging their employees and even they can sell the app’s and take profit out of it.