iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

re: iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

Don Burnett — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 17:51:56 GMT

What kind of program can you come up with on the iPhone dev system in 90 seconds?

When you can do this on the iPhone with Interface Builder (I do iphone work as well as WP7 and Android..

When you can do all of this as rapidly on the iphone as you can Windows Phone 7 then I'll say Apple and Google (with AppInventor) has something... As far as monotouch goes.. It can't do this this quickly either...

www.youtube.com/watch

Do a fair tools comparison for those commenting (don't be a fanboy), and Shawn get out of visual studilo for these comparisons ;-)

re: iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

Adam Wright — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:26:46 GMT

Interesting article Shawn, but a bit mistaken in places. I decided to writeup a response post myself, showing me write the iPhone version using an identical amount of code, at http://www.archgrove.co.uk/weblog/2010/03/25/104. I've also looked a bit at why you might have come to these conclusions.

I look forward to reading more!

re: iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

Shawn Burke - MSFT — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:23:00 GMT

@Scott - I understand your point, thanks. But in case it's not clear (in which case I'll clarify it), the iPhone version comes straight out of the iPhone SDK, including using IB for the UI. If I had written it, then you'd be right. I'm making the assumption that the samples in the iPhone SDK represent best practices in terms of using the tools.

re: iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

Scott Densmore — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 07:43:05 GMT

I don't think it is fair that you know the VS tooling better than the iPhone SDK and do comparisons. I could do the same and say that working in WP7 is much harder... I just don't know the tooling. You could have had IB generate a lot of the code you wrote yourself. If you are going to do "real" comparisons, I say you stop posting about the iPhone until you actually learn the tools and can do "honest" comparisons. Focus on what you know which is the WP7 tools, please don't knock the others. You sound like you are working for the government.

re: iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

Shawn Burke - MSFT — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 22:17:42 GMT

The answer to this question depends on how you define "Silverlight".

On triggers and behaviors, those components actually come from Blend, and you can still use them via Blend. So they're there, but not part of the default platform, same as in Silverlight 3.

The vast, vast majority of what developers think of as Silverlight is there (e.g. "in the box")

What's not fall into three buckets:

1) Stuff that doesn't make sense on the phone.

Examples of this are pretty much everthing in System.Windows.Browser (e.g. DOM Bridge). That's intended for an app running in the browser, which isn't the case on the phone, so it's not there.

2) Stuff that could run but isn't optimized/styled/etc.

DataGrid is a great example. DataGrid isn't a great UI for the phone, so we haven't done the work to style it for the phone but there's no technical reason why it *shouldn't* run. There's few examples of this, like tooltip (no mouse!) that are techically there but not styled and you won't see them as part of the default dev API set.

3) Stuff that isn't available due to platform differences and/or aren't there "yet".

There are a few things that aren't there: Reflection.Emit isn't supported on the phone's runtime and we're looking at what to do there. Sockets are important and we'll add them in the future, and this is probably the biggest one.

On the other hand, there's a bunch of stuff that isn't anywhere BUT the phone: sensors, media access, notifications, location, etc.

So it goes both ways!

We've got a MEF build that works on the phone, I think we're figuring out how to deliver it.

re: iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

alxt — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 21:11:23 GMT

Thanks Shawn, this is really cool! Here's a question - does Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 series include all the features in Silverlight 3.0, including Triggers, Behaviours and the new controls such as DataGrid? Or it is only a subset of full Silverlight functionality? What about the new features in Silverlight 4.0, e.g. MEF, will they be supported for Windows Phone development?

re: iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

pocketMax — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:46:57 GMT

Hi,

I'm running a long-term project similar to this to compare commercial dev. on all major smartphone platforms.

I plan to create the same "commercial" product on WM6, WP7, iPhone, Android and maybe Symbian and Blackberry if time allows. The goal is to finish by the end of the year and compare tool-sets, debugging, and also the issues with releasing and marketing on each platform.

The WM6 version is already in prototype, and for WM7 I've just getting started.

cheers

Bruce Jackson

re: iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

Foobar Boofar — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:05:45 GMT

Nice article!

I always feel people are slightly dishonest in saying that XAML is "no lines of code". It is, and it is harder to understand than normal procedural code for one. I think the most valuable comparison to be made is 1. How easy is it write, and 2. How easy is it for someone else to understand your code. The number of actual lines of code I find to be largely irrelevant.

re: iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

Shawn Burke - MSFT — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:08:28 GMT

Hey lots of great comments!

@Edward - yep, the platform has to be successful for any of this to matter.

@Eduardo - great post, thanks for doing that. I'll be doing several more of these, so keep doing them in MonoTouch. The MonoTouch example is MUCH nicer. I'm not sure I completely agree with you on your XML/XAML comments, but I see your point.

@Frank - yes, MVVM works very, very nicely with Silverlight. But it was overkill for this case as you don't really "need" it to make this very simple app work, which is all many authors really care about. I will definitely be using it in future posts to even it out a bit more where it adds real value.

@Neil - Concept count is a great idea. I'll think about how to use that. To be clear, I'm not super-happy with code counting, it's just hard to find an objective metric here.

@Brian - this has not been my experience with XCode, but it's very possible I'm using it wrong. When I've used it, I've had to hand code most of the things in the h and m files - interface decls, didFinishLaunching init code, instane members, property decls, etc. If there is a way to get the tool to generate all that stuff for me (which I kind of expected, but haven't seen it), I'll happily update the totals. But according to the iPhone SDK walk through(s), you have to type all of them yourself. There are some things it creates (dealloc), but that's just the template. Are there more ways?

re: iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

Miguel de Icaza — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:50:09 GMT

Loved the post, I love the work that you guys have done with the tooling.

Miguel.