I have spent this weekend at a codecamp around the Windows Phone 7 developer tools which was hosted by Trifork here in Århus. We looked at developing apps with Silverlight saturday and at XNA today sunday. It has been a lot of fun, and gave a lot of insights into what we can do with the tools.

Good news on deployment

Since I blogged about my initial thoughts on Windows Phone 7 I have heard a couple of good news around app deployment. First of all I was a little skeptical about the 99 dollar fee, when it is not possible to charge anything for the apps. The good news here is that the 99 dollar fee is refunded when you have deployed two apps to the market. So as someone put it at the codecamp “two fart-apps and you have your money back”. Besides that I heard that you can deploy up to 10 apps directly to the phone when you have the licence – so thats all good.

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This past week I went to a meeting at Trifork about Windows Phone 7, with very big expectations. As an enthusiastic .NET developer the prospect of Microsoft “getting in to the game” of phone development is incredibly interesting. My thoughts before the meeting was that I would probably be talked into buying one right off the bat, so I could get started with writing my own apps.

The meeting started out great with the presenter being all smiles, and with a lot of praise for the phone and the experience he has had playing with it and with the developer tools. He was also happy to show a little app he had written and talked about the nice experience of working with the developer tools and MVVM light. In spite of the presenter being happy about the product, quite a bit of the talk ended up revolving around limitations arund the software that you get out of the box, as well as limitations for the developer.

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