Building an app with Microsoft Windows Phone App Studio

Back in early August the Windows Phone Developer team released a beta of Windows Phone App Studio. This is a complete in browser tool to create Windows Phone apps for publication on your phone or in the Windows Phone store.

Since its release it has seen a couple of cycles with updates and bug fixes including a recent one which integrated access to your SkyDrive cloud storage.

So last week I decided to finally take the WP App Studio for a spin and see how straight forward it is to use and create an app for Windows Phone.

The result of that experience is ISS Jax which is a simple app to show upcoming passes of the International Space Station that are visible in the skies above Jacksonville, Florida.

Since the process of creating this app was so straight forward with WP App Studio I decided to do a demo video to create a similar app called ISS Orlando. This app uses the same data source and icon that I created for ISS Jax except I selected the city of Orlando.

The video is just over 10 minutes long to go through the build process on the WP App Studio website.

If you factor in the icon work and also tweaking the overall design once you see it on your phone to make sure the layout is what you want then it takes less than an hour to put an app together using the WP App Studio.

Once the app is built you can download the source code to edit the app in the Windows Phone developer tools or download an XAP package that is ready to be uploaded to your developer account for publication in the Windows Phone Store.

As I mention in the video submission to the Windows Phone Store will require a little additional work to create icons and screenshots in the required sizes.

Still the overall production time is just a few hours of work.

You will see some slight differences in what I did in the video and the final product as I tweaked the layout a bit afterwards.

Windows Phone App Studio Demo:

Here are the screenshots of the final ISS Orl app:

So have you tried the WP App Studio? If you have built anything with it please share a link in the comments below.

via WindowsObserver.com http://www.windowsobserver.com/2013/09/30/building-an-app-with-microsoft-windows-phone-app-studio/