Nathan Campos

Just 4 weeks ago the Windows Phone Marketplace reached the 50k applications milestone, but there's still a very long way that Microsoft should go until they reach a good place in the "App Store wars". A lot of must-have apps on iOS and Android aren't available for Windows Phone, simple things like a oficial Read it Later client or a decent free Twitter app (The oficial one doesn't include notifications). I've been using my HTC Ultimate (aka Titan) for 4 weeks and I'm loving the OS, but missing a lot of apps from my Android phones and iPhone, that's why I constantly take them with me along-side with my Windows Phone.

For sure Microsoft should be celebrating this, but now that they got a bit more attention from developers they should start to promote their platform more to startups like GetGlue and Read It Later, also get big companies like Google, Dropbox and Adobe to their suite of apps to Windows Phone. Many tech journalists say that they love Windows Phone, the only down-side are the apps which are mostly unavailable for WP.

As a developer, I'm trying Microsoft Visual Studio for Windows Phone and I'm loving the GUI designer and how connected the tools are, different from Android which is a mess for development (in my opinion). The only problem I found on C# is that it's a bit difficult to make simple things like get a XML response from a API asynchronously and populate a List using the information. (Still haven't figured out how to make it)

A good way to attract developers to a platform is to make a lot of tutorials and screencasts to help beginners moving from other platforms like Android or iOS. There are just a few books out there from O'Reilly and Wrox Press about Windows Phone development, but still not a single screencast. The tutorials at MSDN Blogs are good, but still only a few of them and I'm still looking for a good tutorial about XML handling to use more of my development time for Windows Phone.

This article was imported from my old blog . Some things may be broken.