My first windows phone 8 app - SG News Cloud services

I had a small window of time while waiting for my new job and managed to squeeze an application for windows phone 8. I would like to share my experience and decisions along the way.

Why are you creating applications for windows phone 8 when the smartphone OS is low?

 Well, i am not an expert in iOS/android development, although i have led a full team in delivering mobile solutions, but i didn't had opportunity to write full native applications. With less than 1 week of time, i've decided to leverage on my .NET experience to write an application

What advice do you have for me to be an indie developer hoping to get some passive income?

First of all, if you are an indie developer, plan out your budget & time. Even if you have the best application idea, but if it would requires $500,000 of upfront investment (which you find out in the midst of developing), then you are just wasting your own time. Software licenses, equipment, etc were all consider before i started.

When i decided to make a windows phone app, i've read up on what are the software prerequisites. So for windows phone 8, obviously you would need the Windows Phone 8 SDK, and here are the requirements as well as the link. I would also need a cheap windows phone 8 device (i bought a Lumia 620 for SG$350), as well as the developer account (SG$135).

Can you just tell me how much you spent in total before getting everything up?

SG$135 + SG$350 = SG$485

But that's not all, put into consideration the Windows 8 OS that you need in order to use the SDK. Luckily i gotten my windows 8 key from MSDN subscription.

So you mean i have to subscribe for MSDN in order to get everything running? You know how much it costs?

Frankly, i don't know how much it costs, but i managed to get an MSDN account from BizSpark, a short overview, it's a Microsoft initiative to help 'start-ups'. They provide free Azure & MSDN accounts to kick start your 'business'.

Enough of Q&A, if you have more, do comment on this post. Let me give a short breakdown of the architecture.

Even though i was given a free azure account, after some evaluation, i went ahead with Google App Engine (GAE). Reasons?

1. Azure was too much fluff and complicated for me to get a simple thing done. Here's a quick wiki look up of what they are offering.
2. .NET framework is powerful, but too bloated in my case, which might incur high utility costs.

So after deciding on GAE, i was at crossroads once again, Python, Java or Go? I've avoid Azure due to bloat, so no Java. Go is young for my liking, so i went with Python. 

Was it a challenge? 

To my surprise, No. I have zero knowledge on Python but it only took 2 days for everything to start working. Google did a great job in providing python toolkit which offers very useful features, e.g. authentication, authorization, api to Memcached, NoSQL, and many more.

So i hacked up a REST webservice and simple Content Management System (CMS) using GAE, webapp2 and JINJA templates. Tested everything a few rounds and didn't had to bother much about the cloud server anymore. Oh and not to mention GAE gives 1gb of bandwidth daily as opposed to Azure's complicated free tier

I will update with the windows phone 8 application development in my next post :) in the meantime, if you have a windows phone, do take a look SG News