Porting business apps to Windows Phone

Porting business apps to Windows PhoneMichele Capra aka @piccoloaiutante

What is this talk about ?

‣ My personal experience on porting a business App from Android to Windows Phone 8.

IntroductionThe AppDevelopment toolsMockupCodeIntegration with OSApp lifecycleApp publish & store

Agenda‣ The App

‣ Development tools

‣ Mockup

‣ Code and development (UI, component, languages)

‣ Integration with OS

‣ App lifecycle

‣ App publish and store

The MDC clientIntroductionThe AppDevelopment toolsMockupCodeIntegration with OSApp lifecycleApp publish & store

The MDC clientThe case study:

‣ Mobile Data Collection (M.E.A.P.)

‣ create mobile application from a Web interface using a series of widgets

‣ deliver Apps to Android Tablet and Phone, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Phone 8, Windows 8 RT/Pro

‣ developed by Gulliver, an italian company.

Mdc architecture

Mdc Client

App1App2Appn

Data sync Activated client

Available control in MDC‣ Close acquisition (checkbox, radio)

‣ Free acquisition (textbox, maps,

nfc, barcode/qrcode)

‣ Free Grid acquisition

‣ Lookup acquisition

‣ Touch screen acquisition

(signature, draw)

‣ Media (picture, video)

‣ Messages (show text)

‣ Control flow (if, loop)

Android client exampleApplications Add new customerSalesman visit app

Android client exampleProposed product Visit outcome Notes

Windows phone client exampleApplications Add new customerSalesman visit app

Windows phone client exampleProposed product Visit outcome Notes

MDC client

‣ Native clients (no Phone Gap)

‣ Proprietary protocol

‣ Occasionally connected

‣ Several different widget (picture, signature, position, textbox..)

First big questionIntroductionThe AppDevelopment toolsMockupCodeIntegration with OSApp lifecycleApp publish & store

Which Windows Phone version to support ?

First big questionTo support Windows Phone 7 or not?

We chose not to support it:

‣ Clear Microsoft intent to dismiss Windows Phone 7

‣ Some of the components we needed were only for Windows Phone 8.

Android support from 2.3

Development toolsIntroductionThe AppDevelopment toolsMockupCodeIntegration with OSApp lifecycleApp publish & store

Visual Studio 2012

Android IDE

‣ AndroidStudio

‣ Intellij Idea

‣ Eclipse

Both support:

‣ Code completion

‣ Emulator

‣ Debugging

‣ Visual designer

Jet Brains solution could help you:

‣ Intellij Idea keyboard scheme and shortcut are available for Visual Studio through ReSharper plugin

‣ Code navigation, refactoring shortcuts…

MockupIntroductionThe AppDevelopment toolsMockupCodeIntegration with OSApp lifecycleApp publish & store

Mockup‣ UI + Controls + Navigation - Logic

‣ Didn’t look at Android app code

‣ Just investigate

‣ Trying to figure out how to translate App flow from Android to Modern UI

Mockup

‣ Windows phone app

‣ Navigation between pages

‣ No SketchFlow

MockupAndroid Windows Phone

Mockup

ComponentIntroductionThe AppDevelopment toolsMockupCodeIntegration with OSApp lifecycleApp publish & store

Component App capabilities:

‣ Take picture

‣ Read BarCode/QR Code

‣ Read NFC

‣ Get GPS coordinate

‣ Take signature

‣ Use web view

‣ Store data in a database

‣ Multi-language support

Component

‣ Take picture (Intent → Request CameraTask)

‣ Read BarCode/QR Code (ZXing → ZXing.net)

‣ Read NFC (Intent → Microsoft library to do the job)

‣ Get gps coordinate ( LocationManager → GeoLocator)

Component

‣ Take signature (Canvas & Path → InkPresenter)

‣ Use web view (WebView → WebBrowser)

‣ Store data in a database (SQLite → SQLite)

‣ Multilanguage support (Xml file → Multilingual App toolkit)

Component - Database

‣ We had to make a choice between:

‣ LocalDb

‣ SQLite

‣ SQLite won because of the experience with other platform

So let’s start developingIntroductionThe AppDevelopment toolsMockupCodeIntegration with OSApp lifecycleApp publish & store

CodeIntroductionThe AppDevelopment toolsMockupCodeIntegration with OSApp lifecycleApp publish & store

Java vs C#Academic answer for similarities:

‣ Statically strong typed

‣ Class-based, Object-oriented

‣ Semi-interpreted

‣ Garbage collection

Java vs C#‣ convert basic type

‣ change data structure:

‣ Vector<T> → List<T>

‣ HashTable<Integer,Integer> → Dictionary<int,int>

‣ change method name i.e: string.startWith() → string.StartsWith()

‣ StringTokenizer → String.split(string)

Java vs C#

Different pattern:

‣ Android: Model-View-Presenter pattern but View and Presenter highly coupled.

‣ Windows Phone: Model-View-ViewModel pattern, Binding mechanism.

FrameworkCaliburn as framework:

‣ Screen-conductor mechanism

‣ Screen: a stateful unit of work existing within the presentation tier of an application. It’s independent from the application shell.

‣ Conductor: Conductors manage the life cycle state of one or more screens.

Framework

Conductor

(ViewModel, Page)

Screen

(ViewModel,UserControl)

FrameworkCaliburn as framework:

‣ EventAggregator: messaging between classes

‣ PhoneBootstrapper: custom bootstrapper designed to setup phone applications.

UIIntroductionThe AppDevelopment toolsMockupCodeIntegration with OSApp lifecycleApp publish & store

XML vs XAMLSimilarity:

‣ LinearLayout → StackPanel

‣ TextView, TextEdit → TextBlock,TextBox

‣ ScrollView → ScrollViewer

‣ Radio Group, RadioButton → RadioButton

Values vs Xaml style

Android Values:

<color name=“white”>#FFFFFFFF</color>

Windows Phone Xaml control style:

<Color x:Key="white">#FFFFFFFF</Color>

Integration with OSIntroductionThe AppDevelopment toolsMockupCodeIntegration with OSApp lifecycleApp publish & store

Integration with OS

‣ Make a phone call

‣ Send an email

‣ Open Map

‣ Navigate to a place

‣ Open link in browser

‣ Open pdf/office file

Integration with OSIn Android you do this by intent and activity.

Intent callIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_CALL);

callIntent.setData(Uri.parse("tel:0377778888"));

startActivity(callIntent);

Integration with OSIn Windows Phone you use Tasks.

PhoneCallTask phoneCallTask = new PhoneCallTask();

phoneCallTask.PhoneNumber = "2065550123";

phoneCallTask.Show();

Integration with OSSending email in Android.

Intent emailIntent = new Intent(android.content.Intent.ACTION_SEND);

emailIntent.putExtra(android.content.Intent.EXTRA_EMAIL, new String[]{to});

startActivity(emailIntent);

Integration with OSSending email in Windows Phone.

EmailComposeTask emailComposeTask = new EmailComposeTask();

emailComposeTask.To = “michele@orangecode.it”;

emailComposeTask.Show();

App lifecycleIntroductionThe AppDevelopment toolsMockupCodeIntegration with OSApp lifecycleApp publish & store

Android activity lifecycle

Windows Phone lifecycle

Be careful

From Microsoft docs:

“It is possible, however, for an app to be tombstoned after the user navigates away. In this case, the app is not preserved in memory, but some information about the app is stored – most importantly for this topic, the State dictionary of the PhoneApplicationPage object is stored”

Be careful

‣ Serialised and deserialise the app state that is not a part of the page

‣ Rebind all the dependencies

‣ Update UI value (i.e: something typed from user before tombstoning)

Be careful

StoreIntroductionThe AppDevelopment toolsMockupCodeIntegration with OSApp lifecycleApp publish & store

App package

‣ Xap file which includes everything needed from the app.

‣ It’s almost like an apk file.

‣ You cannot install xap out of store.

Google Play store

‣ Generate key pair and certificate and keystone

‣ Sign your app and verify signed app

‣ Upload and publish to Play store

Windows Phone store

Validation

‣ Package verification

Certification

‣ Sign and encryption

Publish

‣ Ready to be published

Windows Store Test Kit

The Windows Phone Windows Phone Store Test Kit (formerly named Marketplace Test Kit) provides a suite of automated and manual tests to help prepare your apps to be accepted in the Windows Phone Store the first time you submit them.

Testing for tombstoning

‣ Before upload your xap to store simulate tombstoning and test your app manually.

‣ Tombstoning could be forced manually by Visual Studio.

Recap‣ The App

‣ Development tools

‣ Mockup

‣ Code and development (UI, Component, languages)

‣ Integration with OS

‣ App Lifecycle

‣ App publish and store

My personal experience

‣ Java is not far from C#

‣ Build a mockup in order to explore new platform

‣ Keep an eye on app lifecycle

‣ No object mapping SQLite-net is too slow

‣ I doubt that i would reuse a framework

‣ I would rather use a toolkit

‣ MVP gave to Android app the possibility to have full access and control of the UI

‣ MVVM gave to Windows Phone 8 a partial access to the UI

‣ ViewFirst approach was a part of the problem

grazie! @piccoloaiutante

Porting business apps to Windows Phone

Technology

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