Image by BUILDWindows (Creative Commons License: Attribution)

Kicking off on Saturday 16 June at 10am, we have plenty of power sockets, wifi, whiteboards, drinks, pizza, games, prizes and some quiet space that you can work in. We’ve also people on hand with Windows Phone and Windows 8 experience to help you along the way.

There will be an attendee-voted schedule of talks but we’ll keep these out of your way if you just want to get on and code. We’ll also provide all you need to know around submitting your app to the Windows Store. You can even schedule a slot for an app review.

If you have a Windows Phone app in Marketplace, now’s a great time to look at getting it onto Windows 8. Sign up. Bring your laptop. Bring your app. Bring Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11. We’ll do our best to help you get your app onto Windows 8!

Location & Venue TBA but it will be in central London, accessible by major railway and underground transportation.

Click here for more details and to register for the event.

You’ll be pleased to hear that the official materials including Hands on Labs, presentations, samples and other resources are now available for download. You can find them here:

Windows 8 Camp in a Box, Consumer Preview Edition

In addition, there’s a limit to the number of side-loaded apps you can have installed on the Consumer Preview. If you exceed the limit you wont be able to renew your developer licence. I hit this issue at one of our events last week and seeing a complete list of all the installed app packages was very useful.

It’s very easy to see the list:

1/ Open a PowerShell window

2/ Enter “Get-AppxPackage”

You’ll see a complete listing of all the installed packages.

What if you just want to see the ones you’ve created (rather than, for example, pre-installed packages and those downloaded from the Windows Store)? I was playing around with this idea earlier today and came up with the following:

Write-Host; 
Get-AppxPackage | ForEach-Object { 
  if ($_.Publisher.Contains("CN=mormond")) { 
    Write-Host "-- PackageFullName: " $_.PackageFullName; 
    Write-Host "   InstallLocation: " $_.InstallLocation 
  }
};
Write-Host

Just change the publisher name from “mormond” to whatever is appropriate for your apps. The result is a summary list of the PackageFullName + InstallLocation for each app installed and signed with your developer licence. I used it to remove a bunch of app packages for which I’d deleted / moved the project files but I’d failed to uninstall the app itself.

Well worth it though if you’re selected…

Get the beta from Marketplace here

This means devices based on the SoC (System on a Chip) architecture and with less memory (256MB vs the current 512MB requirement) paving the way for lower cost-devices without sacrificing the amazing Windows Phone experience.

One device announced that will take advantage of these enhancements is the new Nokia 610 (joining their existing line-up of 710, 800 and 900). Also announced is a new device from ZTE, the Orbit.

What does this mean for developers?

Well for one, that’s a massive increase in the market opportunity for your apps. Overnight (well not quite overnight – we plan to open up these new markets over the next month) these changes will result in almost 60% more potential customers for Windows Phone.

But there are also some technical implications

It’s important to test your apps running against the 256MB footprint as well as making some other changes to ensure your apps perform well on these new devices. There’s an update to the SDK (7.1.1 available now as a pre-release CTP) that includes a 256MB emulator image to enable testing. You should also review the MSDN “What’s new” documentation and “Developing for 256MB Devices” as there are some other implications.

If you decide that your app is one of the few that wont / can’t run on the new devices, you can opt-out via the App Manifest by adding a Requirement with Name "ID_REQ_MEMORY_90”. This prevents users with 256MB devices from seeing your application on the Marketplace.

And remember that it’s up to you to indicate that you want your apps deployed to these new marketplaces as they come on-stream. It doesn’t happen automatically. You need to make this happen via AppHub.

More details in Terry Myersons’ post on the Windows Phone Blog and Joe Belfiore’s post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog.

London is on Saturday 4th Feb (I’ll be there)

Bristol is on Saturday 11th Feb (my fellow evangelist Andrew Spooner will be there)

For full details see the UK MSDN blog (don’t ask me about that URL – that’s certainly not very SEO friendly).

Q. Tell me a bit about your background and Escapist Games.

Chris (fellow-founder of Escapist Games) and I are ex Criterion Games. We decided we wanted to get out and start working on direct to consumer digital marketplaces. We started out with Xbox Live indie titles and progressed to looking at mobile platforms. We found that while we could produce great quality on Xbox Live, we just weren’t seeing the sales we needed to move the company forward.

We drifted towards iOS and started playing with AR (augmented reality). We then created Star Chart in XNA in about a month and ported that to the iOS eventually launching it both as an iPhone app and an Xbox Live indie game. Then we sort of forgot about it for a while and focused on other projects.

We started to notice something interesting about Star Chart in its Xbox Live incarnation. It had an amazing conversion rate; 74% of people who downloaded the trial went on to purchase the application. Although we did get off to a very slow start, the iPhone version really took off over the summer, presumably due to the weather being better suited for star-gazing!

We’ve just hired our 9^th employee and have apps published on Windows Phone, iOS and Android as well as being in the Ovi Store. We’re really pleased with our sales. We’re expecting to break 1.5M downloads by the end of the year. In fact the success of Star Chart worldwide has been a little bit overwhelming. We knew it was cool and interesting but we didn’t know whether that was down to our geeky tendencies or whether it would have a broader appeal. It seems to have a very broad appeal.

Q. And what about the Star Chart application?

I describe it as a high-tech star gazing companion. It’s an AR astronomy app that allows you to see what’s out there without any knowledge of astronomy. We’re not astronomers though we’re interested in the stars and planets. Our vision was to make the heavens, which are often considered overwhelmingly awe-inspiring, something that is accessible to everyone. It’s like having a knowledgeable friend in your pocket. Just hold it up to the sky and it tells you what you’re looking at, be it a star or a planet.

It’s funny because it’s not the business model we started out with – games. Instead we’ve created an educational application. It’s something we use a lot ourselves and it’s a beautiful educational application. It has a lot in common with a great game – we really focus on the visuals. We want to build something that people will love.

We have something like 127,000 stars in our database as well as planets and we’re adding a time-warp feature that allows you to see how the planets move over time. We’re also adding a 3D planets feature that will allow you to “fly away” from earth and travel to other planets, see the rings of Saturn and the swirling mists around Jupiter for example. Star Chart will just get richer and richer over time.

Q. What Mango features did you take advantage of?

We took advantage of the ability to combine an XNA drawing surface with Silverlight controls to make it easier to render our UI. And our AR implementation was based on the Motion API which gave us a very high quality experience in a very short space of time.

Q. Did anything surprise you about the Windows Phone implementation?

A few things, yes. Overall Windows Phone has shown us just how good AR can be. Before Windows Phone, iOS was the best AR platform we had but it still suffered from a slight lag and some jitter. On Windows Phone we suddenly saw those weren’t an issue. It made us realize that we weren’t hitting the limitations of AR at all. It made us go back and re-visit our implementation on other platforms to try and tune it to match the quality we were seeing on Windows Phone.

The Windows Phone SDK was a revelation. It made us so much more productive we could devote much more time to adding polish to the app. The fundamentals were already there. As an example we used the Motion API for our AR implementation. We’d set aside 2 weeks to do this on Windows Phone and the developer working on it had it up and running by lunchtime. The maturity of the SDK meant it was easier to achieve what we needed to. And in some areas, such as AR, the results were simply remarkable.

In terms of challenges, we faced some constraints around the lack of certain types of shader and limitations on colour depth. We’re still working on optimizing some of these things so we can make the app even better on the Windows Phone platform.

Overall though, the Windows Phone SDK simply allowed us to focus on making the application as good as it could be – it “got out of the way” and let us focus on building the application we wanted.

More Information

For more information on Windows Phone development, visit AppHub or download the SDK.

For Silverlight apps you’ll need:

• ID_CAP_IDENTITY_USER
• ID_CAP_MEDIALIB
• ID_CAP_NETWORKING
• ID_CAP_PHONEDIALER
• ID_CAP_WEBBROWSERCOMPONENT

For XNA apps you’ll need:

• ID_CAP_IDENTITY_USER
• ID_CAP_NETWORKING
• ID_CAP_PHONEDIALER

More details in the MSDN documentation here.

For more about capabilities and specifically, determining the minimum set of capabilities your app needs to function correctly, see “How to: Determine Application Capabilities” on MSDN.

What does this mean? It means it’s really simple to integrate advertising into your Windows Phone application (or game, Silverlight or XNA). Microsoft Advertising Network servers deliver ads to your users and you get a share of the advertising revenue.

In-App advertising can offer a great alternative mechanism for monetizing your apps. Instead of charging up-front, you offer the app for free and make money through advertising. Or you offer a free, ad-supported version alongside a paid, ad-free version. Experimenting with different models may itself prove to be a very worthwhile investment!

I’m going to walk through a very simple example. All that’s required is:

• The Windows Phone SDK 7.1
• An AppHub account (to publish your app)
• A Microsoft pubCenter account (this is where advertising is linked to your app)

Step 1 – Create your Windows Phone Application

Here’s mine.

Step 2 – Incorporate the AdControl in your App

The Microsoft Advertising SDK ships as part of the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 so as long as you have the tools, you have all you need to embed the AdControl. Simply decide on the appropriate layout (generally the control should be positioned either at the top or bottom of the screen) and add the control from the Toolbox in VS.

Step 3 – Check the Layout

By default, if you drop the AdControl onto the design surface, it will configure its ApplicationId and AdUnitId to display a test ad so you can check all’s well. I’ve opted to add the AdControl to the outer LayoutRoot Grid by creating a new row at the bottom of the page. This allows space for the full size of the ad. The standard size for the AdControl is 480x80 and it’s recommended you use this.

Step 4 – Wire Things Up in pubCenter

In pubCenter you need to first register the application (which gives you an ApplicationId) and then create something called an Ad unit. These partition up ads in terms of size and content categories. When you’ve created one you’ll get an AdUnitId. These are the values you use to set the properties on your AdControl.

Step 5 – Update Your AdControl Properties

Set the ApplicationId and AdUnitId properties on your AdControl to the values you got from pubCenter.

Step 6 – Be Patient

After a short delay, ads will start to be served to your application.

Step 7 – Publish to AppHub as Normal

Below are a some useful links for more information:

• Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows Phone on MSDN
• Monetize your Windows Phone 7 Apps on the Microsoft Advertsiisng site
• Monetization Best Practices for In-App Ads
• AppHub
• Microsoft pubCenter
• Original announcement on The Windows Phone Developer Blog
• Original announcement on the Microsoft Advertising Blog