Friday 1 July 2011

Windows Phone 7 Development and Windows Phone Device Manager #4

Not getting on that well ...

I installed WPDM, but it won't run - just starts and almost immediately stops.

It transpires that I need version 1.4 to coexist with the latest WP Developer Tools, but that version 1.4 is still in private beta, with no date given for a public one.

So either
a) I wait an indeterminate time, or
b) I make a donation to the suppliers of WPDM and they consider (but do not guarantee) making me a beta tester and thus giving me access to 1.4, or
c) I waste the morning's effort installing the Developer Tools, take them off my PC, install the penultimate version, and hope that works with 1.3 (which is quite backlevel in terms of functionality anyway - should I be reviewing it at all, on that basis?), or
d) I decide now that the almost non-existent support that seems to be on offer is never going to allow for use of the product in a business context, and drop the idea (my level of curiosity isn't going to allow this).

Some more depressing news picked up during the above researches is that the product gets inside WP7 by, effectively, loading a manufacturer specific 'adopt authority' DLL.I hope that once Microsoft provide supported unlocking they will give developers a better method than that, otherwise here's another reason for lack of acceptance in a business context.

2 comments:

  1. IMO, the donation is worth it. (WPDM has 1 dev, Julian Schapman.) He WILL make you a beta tester. I think I donated $5, so it's no biggie.

    Support is via the touchxperience forum. The beta tester forum is visible to beta testers only.

    Support questions, in my experience, get responded to in short time.

    No, I'm not his mom. Just an appreciative user of apps that let me treat my phone as I treat my desktop OS: as raw material to be tweaked to my idiosyncrasies.

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  2. Thanks for the advice. I'll donate over the next couple of days and see what happens!

    I have to say I'm not impressed by the standard of coding so far - nothing should ever just stop without either an error message or any logging.

    I think (assuming I get it working at some point) that I will review the potential functionality (because what this product can do, other, more commercial, developers can do too) rather than worrying too much about the product as a marketable, supported entity.

    It's clearly fine for users like yourself, potentially far less so for business users who simply need functionality that extends what the vanilla 'phone can provide (these were going to be my review's target audience). But I am keeping an open mind.

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