Over to you Tim!

Got talking to Tim Rogers and I was staggered to see what he has done in a very short space of time. Its a great story, especially as he is not a Computer Science student. Have a read of Tim’s experiences and let me know what you think.

I’m Tim Rogers, or @timROGERS on Twitter – I’m a student of European Social and Political Studies at University College London as well as a Microsoft Student Partner (MSP). As a shameless geek, I love developing for the web – and now also for mobile! Mobile apps have been a big interest for me as a developer recently - despite my lack of development skills. I’ve built apps for Android and iOS and published them on their respective stores, but I’ve always been forced to use unusual frameworks and hacks to make them with what I know best as a web developer: HTML, CSS and Javascript.

On these platforms, I’ve always found the learning curve to be too steep to learn the native code and so the user experience of my apps has never been brilliant. However, when I made the jump onto the Windows Phone platform this was not necessary – things just fell into place and I found it very easy to get up and running with the drag and drop design and pretty simple coding.

In just a few months, I’ve built a number of apps that I never thought I would be able to create so quickly. I’ve made a news app for my university, University College London, using one of the many great free templates available on the Internet, SocialViewer. But my main success and my proudest achievement has been with soundboards that I’ve built. Without doubt, soundboards are one of the staple parts of the app ecosystem! I made these from scratch, learning the C# code I needed as I went along, and they’ve turned out to be really good.

The internet is full of resources for finding the right methods to do things like play sounds or save a clip as a ringtone or whatever else you want to do to make your app. A quick search online is all I’ve ever needed to solve a problem, allowing me to get my apps going quickly. Building soundboards has been an interesting experience and people really do enjoy using these apps, and they’re a great way to learning to build more complex things. With them, I get to be creative, using pictures to spice up the app, my choice of sounds and positioning the UI controls for the best look. And then I publish them to the marketplace where millions of people can see them , download them and play with them – my first soundboard, one made up of sounds from The Joker in The Dark Knight, has now been downloaded over 1,500 times: quite an achievement I think for a new Windows Phone developer like me!

I’ve had by far the best developer experience on the Microsoft platform in publishing as well as in the developing itself. On iOS, there are all sorts of bizarre profiles and certificates you have to use to submit to the App Store. Android is similar but a little better, requiring you to use command line tools to sign your apps. But Windows Phone makes this incredibly easy, you don’t even have to think about it – you just build the app directly in Visual Studio with one click and it’s ready to go – just upload the .XAP file to App Hub, the Marketplace developer portal and you can be on the Marketplace. From Visual Studio, you can also try your app on your own phone if you’ve got one! What’s more, there are great prizes you can get if you’re a developer in the UK just for making apps, whatever you’re building – Microsoft runs the Windows Phone Incentive which gets you points for each app which can then be exchanged for serious prizes – including an Xbox (my personal choice!) which I’m just waiting for now – not bad!

If you’re a student like me, you can get all this experience for nothing – the chance to learn, be creative and maybe even make some money – through DreamSpark. All you have to do is identify yourself as a student, and then you can submit to the Marketplace without paying the $99 subscription and download the Windows Phone Developer Tools for free as well – you’ll be going in no time.

All in all, I’d highly recommend trying Windows Phone development for yourself, whether you’re a programming expert or a complete novice – whatever stage you’re at, there will be a path to make something brilliant and you’re guaranteed to enjoy yourself and learn in the process. You can see everything I’ve built on the Marketplace!