Charlie Kindel on Windows Phone Development

Windows Phone Developer Documentation

Charlie Kindel (Kindel Systems) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 22:12:07 GMT

It’s been almost two weeks since we made the Windows Phone Developer Tools available at MIX10, and hopefully you’ve all been off coding up some great apps and games!

There’s a lot of “surface area” to this platform, so I thought I’d make sure everyone knew where the developer documentation for Windows Phone 7 Series was, and give you highlights of what’s available. Keep in mind that the Windows Phone developer documentation was written for the CTP and that it will be expanded as we get closer to final release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools. We’ll also be doing much more to “bring it together” so that blog posts like this are not as necessary :-).

Your first stop should be MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network for those of you new to the MS world), where we have the bulk of Windows Phone development documentation. There’s all sorts of great stuff here, including:

Code Samples for Windows Phone
An Application Platform Overview for Windows Phone that covers how all the pieces fit together
A Getting Started Guide for Developing for Windows Phone that includes everything you need to create your first Silverlight or XNA Framework application
A Programming Guide for Windows Phone with overviews of features and how to guides with code snippets
The Class Library Reference for Windows Phone

Other important documentation links include Developing Windows Phone Games and Silverlight for Windows Phone as a part of the XNA Game Studio 4.0 and Silverlight 4 RC documentation sets, respectively.

Lastly, if you have feedback about our documentation, join the discussion in the Windows Phone forums or use the ratings control in the upper right-hand side of the pages on MSDN. Like this:

I’m getting a huge kick out of seeing all the apps & games that are being developed. It’s pretty cool to think about how this is just the tip of the iceberg!

The Venn Diagram of Brandon Watson

Charlie Kindel (Kindel Systems) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:06:14 GMT

When I joined the Windows Phone effort I initially had some reservations, but they mostly were about leaving my old team whom I loved dearly.

But the combination of aligning my experience and passion with the insanity of actually pulling something so big off in such a short amount of time made it a no brainer.

Thus when I ran into Brandon Watson last November at MS event after not seeing him since we had worked on IIS together in the stone ages my immediate thought was “We have to get this guy to join the team”.

Brandon gets developers. Best of all he gets today’s developers. So I’m really glad he’s decided to join the Windows Phone developer evangelism effort.

You’ll be glad too. Give him a shout out congratulating him @brandonwatson on twitter and subscribe to his blog feed at http://www.manyniches.com.

Announcements at MIX!

Charlie Kindel (Kindel Systems) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:57:50 GMT

I just posted a post to the Windows Phone Developer blog covering all the stuff we’ve announced at MIX regarding Windows Phone development.

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/wpdev/archive/2010/03/15/the-right-mix.aspx

I literally just got off stage after doing my keynote demo. My heart was racing, but I didn’t trip and fall and the demo worked! Whew.

You can watch the keynote on-demand at http://live.visitmix.com

All of the sessions providing details on the Windows Phone developer platform will also be available at http://live.visitmix.com if you could not make it to MIX10 this year!

Looking into the future – last year

Charlie Kindel (Kindel Systems) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:23:28 GMT

Along with the “king for a day” memo we wrote up last year, we also ran a little exercise with the team at large to get focused on what was really important to developers. First we had the team talk to and read reports of existing Windows mobile, iPhone, and other smartphone developers. We wanted to make sure everyone knew what developers thought of the current mobile app & game platforms and tools.

Then we said to the team

“Pretend you writing a product review for your friends and family. Also pretend it is late 2010 and the new phones with Windows Phone 7 Series are in consumers hands and developers have been building & selling apps & games for a while. Write a fictional review critiquing what we built.”

We actually did this at an “offsite meeting” and had groups of 3-4 people go off for about an hour and report back to the group. We really wanted to get people thinking about this product the way connected busy people outside of Microsoft would perceive it.

Below are some of the quotes we pulled from those reviews. We put these in the planning document used by the entire Windows Phone organization, we posted them on the walls, and regularly asked people on the team “Is what you are doing going to help ensure customers or the industry says this…?”

I literally copied and pasted the bulleted list from the internal planning memo (and no, you can’t see the whole thing :-)):

Getting started is cheap and easy
- No developer will complain about tools pricing
- Downloading and installing the tools is simple and all documentation is in one place
- The development model is prescriptive and obvious
- A vibrant and open community is there to help
Real money comes in quickly & constantly
- There’s one place to hawk wares and getting paid is friction-free
- Developers’ IP and revenue are protected from shady characters
Tools and processes provide instant and continuous gratification
- Individual developers are highly productive; the code-build-test cycle is fast and fun
- Shipping new versions is quick and easy with seamless marketplace experience
- Customer feedback is direct & frequent
Technology and APIs are well designed and cohesive
- Managed code means high developer productivity
- Creating apps consistent with the built-in phone experience is automatic
- Developers with Silverlight or XNA experience “already know how”
- It’s great how well it integrates with Live and other cloud services
- There are 100% solutions to 80% of scenarios; the prescriptive architecture puts development “on rails”
It’s easy to build beautiful applications users just love
- The platform makes it easy to ensure performance, reliability, security, and battery life.
- The platform encourages high-quality and rejects low.
- Deployment, upgrades, updates and safe removal are handled by the platform
- An application that works on one device form-factor works on all others

At MIX next week you will (hopefully!) get all the details you need to see if we’ve accomplished the above. I know I am personally extremely excited to hear what developers have to say about what we’re enabling. Which aspects did we nail? Where did we come up short? Where do you want us to invest more in the future?

I know you won’t hold back in letting us know.

Getting our Game On

Charlie Kindel (Kindel Systems) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:27:00 GMT

I’m at the Game Developer Conference (GDC 2010) here in San Francisco most of the week. The conference has barely started and there’s already a ton of great buzz about gaming for Windows Phone 7 Series.

A screenshot from the prototype 3D game “The Harvest” by LumaArcade running on Windows Phone 7 Series. More in Andre Vrignaud’s (@Ozymandias) post here.

It seems like it was _years_ ago when I joined to Windows Phone effort, but it’s really only been just over a year. We’ve accomplished so much in such a short amount of time it really is hard to believe. One of the first things I did when I started the job was write down my “dream” for the app/game platform and developer experience. I said to myself “Hey, if I were king for a day what would I decree?” With the help form a few others on the team we wrote down a short description of what we should do. Note, this was before the org was really settled, before “formal planning” had actually started, and before I really knew how much leeway & freedom we’d be provided.

It turns out this exercise was really easy; either we were a group of clones separated at birth, or the “right thing to do” was just blatantly obvious. The essence of that “memo” (it was actually several emails and a few poorly formatted PowerPoint decks <g>) was:

Create a modern app & game framework based on Sliverlight & XNA
- XNA for 2D & 3D simulations and games
- Silverlight for apps (and some games)
Make “Web 2.0” service integration including Xbox LIVE support integral
Deliver phenomenal tools
- Including exposing the power that XNA Game Studio already exposed to indie game developers
Create a simplified/consistent hardware ecosystem
Launch it all for developers in early 2010

This is all coming to fruition! I love it when simple ideas turn into real plans.

Once we got serious about planning we looked at the calendar and realized that the timing of GDC and MIX in early March was perfect for our launch. We’d tell the story about the new end-user focus at Mobile World Congress in February, let that message settle in for a few weeks, engage with game developers at GDC, and then polish it all off with a final big bang at MIX the next week.

Well, here we are at GDC and the big news is how we’ve upped our investment in XNA Game Studio 4.0 to not only support Windows Phone development but to increase its power. Michael Klutcher, who’s a program manager for XNA Game Studio and Xbox LIVE has a great post here you should really read. The key news we are focusing on here at GDC are (I stole this from our official press briefing docs):

XNA Game Studio 4.0

XNA Game Studio 4.0 is a set of software tools that will be used by developers to create games for Windows Phone 7 Series. This updated version of XNA Game Studio will allow game developers to create better mobile games faster by providing:

Power: XNA Game Studio 4.0 includes powerful audio and graphics tools that allow developers to create all types of games, from casual 2-D games to 3-D games with high-quality graphics.
Productivity: XNA Game Studio 4.0 is a managed code platform, which means that Microsoft has done the back-end work that will save developers time in the coding process. It allows developers to be more productive and focus on gameplay and design.
Portability: XNA Game Studio 4.0 makes it possible for developers to adapt games built on previous versions of XNA Game Studio to work on Windows Phone 7 Series without re-coding the entire game. Also, once a developer has created a Windows Phone 7 Series game, they can use some of that code in XNA Game Studio 3.1 to adapt that game for Xbox 360, Windows or Zune.

Pedigree: Microsoft has invested in XNA Game Studio for the past four years to make it one of the most comprehensive and trusted tools for developers. There have been over 1 million downloads of previous versions of XNA Game Studio since its initial release in December 2006

Game Development on Windows Phone 7 Series

Windows Phone 7 Series is a whole new approach to phone software, distinguished by smart design and truly integrated experiences. It offers users new ways to find and play games, including:

The games hub. The games hub will contain all the games an individual has acquired through the Windows® Phone Marketplace. We are partnering with a select group of publishers to create great Xbox LIVE games for the games hub. The Xbox LIVE features include the ability to:

Collect Achievements and build your Gamerscore
View Xbox LIVE leaderboards
See your Xbox LIVE Avatar
Access Spotlight feeds
Add Xbox LIVE friends to your friends list while out on the go

The marketplace hub. Windows Phone 7 Series includes the Windows® Phone Marketplace, where apps and games will be sold. Both independent and professional developers can offer games as apps via Marketplace, giving consumers a wide array of games to choose from.

Here at GDC we’ve been showing off a set of prototype games running on real phones, all developed using XNA Game Studio 4.0. Above I posted a screenshot of The Harvest. It’s an action RPG that illustrates the potential for “core” games on the platform. It shows off awesome 3D action, sound, touch input, and 3D destructive environment.

Below is a shot of another prototype game we’re showing, “Battle Punks” by Garage Games / Gravity Bear. Again, it’s a full 3D game but designed to illustrate a more “social” gaming experience.

Both games show off Xbox LIVE support. Both are running at the full 800x480 resolution. Both illustrate the productivity, power, and portability provided by XNA Game Studio 4.0.

To learn more I encourage you to follow Michael on his blog and twitter (@mklucher). You should also pay attention to Shawn Hargreaves and Andre Vrignaud (make sure you tease Andre about his Twitter handle).

As I mentioned I’ll be here at GDC all week. I then get to go directly to Las Vegas for MIX where we’ll have even more great stuff to show off and share.

Windows Phone 7 Series Video Roundup

Charlie Kindel (Kindel Systems) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:04:00 GMT

Just went through a bunch of the videos that were made over the last few weeks and figured I’d share them as a collection. Some really great stuff here.

Enjoy!

Windows Phone 7 Series demos

Windows Phone 7 Series Features Video – A marketing video from www.windowsphone7series.com

Windows Phone 7 Series demo – Another marketing video from www.windowsphone7series.com

Me being interviewed by Ina Fried of CNET

JoeB’s Channel9 demo – Recorded right before Mobile World Congress in February

Live demo walkthrough with Chris Prillo

“Metro” Design

The Windows Phone designers at the TED Conference

Bill Buxton and Albert Shum on Channel 9

Yes, it is an older mockup

Charlie Kindel (Kindel Systems) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:03:09 GMT

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/04/windows-phone-7-series-mockup-changes-slightly-zune-menu-making/

Different Means Better with the new Windows Phone Developer Experience

Charlie Kindel (Kindel Systems) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:30:00 GMT

In just over a week we (finally!) get to pull the cover off of the Windows Phone application & game developer experience at MIX10. There, through keynotes and more than 12 technical sessions over 3 days, we will “tell all” about the what and how of the new developer platform for Windows Phones.

Today, I get to talk about the why. My previous post on focus hinted at this, but today I get to be even more explicit. In fact, I’m literally down in San Francisco and talking with a few industry watchers about our platform strategy and thought I’d invite you all to the conversation as well.

In addition to the update I’ll share below, we’ll be taking questions via Twitter at @WP7dev (use #wp7dev as well) starting at 6PM PST tonight.

In our announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series at Mobile World Congress on February 15 you saw just how different Windows Phone 7 Series is. It’s different from what we’ve done in the phone space before and it’s different from other phones.

Different is often good. Especially when it’s different for good reasons. Windows Phone 7 Series is different because we reset everything we were doing to focus on end user experience. This extends directly to the developer platform.

Developers, designers, and producers of applications, games, and content these days are demanding that we be different as well. Over the last year we’ve had face to face conversations with 100s of developers all over the world about what we should do with Windows Phone 7 Series. We heard they want:

to create truly compelling apps and games users will love.
to get more done with better tool productivity and platform capabilities.
greater opportunity; not just on the phone but across the PC, web, and TV/game console.

Microsoft had to change its strategy to accommodate what developers have been asking for. Specifically developers told us to

focus on the end user experience and take more responsibility for delivering integrated end user experiences.
invest more deeply in the developer platform and developer experience.
drive a standardized hardware platform creating a simpler ecosystem and a larger, consistent, opportunity.

The Windows Phone 7 Series developer platform is as different as the new user experience. It’s fresh. It’s pure. And it’s powerful.

We took the feedback we gathered from developers, looked at the full potential of Windows Phone 7 Series and landed on 3 basic goals for the platform we’re delivering;

Enable end users to be able to personalize their phone experience through a large library of innovative, compelling, games and applications.
Enable developers to profit.
Advance the “3 screen plus cloud” vision

The first one is pretty obvious: A key value proposition for Windows Phone is personal. We believe consumers will use games and applications to make their phone experience their own.

(Did you notice we always talk about applications and games? A little factoid I heard today: According eMarketer, the number of people playing games on the phone has more than doubled in recent years;340M people will play games on the phone in 2010 up from 155M in 2007).

But what do we mean by “profit” in the second goal? When we talk with developers we hear them talk about three different “currencies”: making money, learning, and recognition. Some developers are in it for the money. They are either literally being paid to write code or they are writing code with the hope it will generate coin.

Other developers tell us they are interested in advancing their knowledge – love of the game. They love learning about computers, programming, games, social connections, etc… So they build software to learn. They profit by being smarter.

Other developers are clearly motivated by pride. Maybe there’s a bit of money and learning involved, but to these developers being noticed or recognized as doing wickedly epic sh*t is top of the list for how they measure profit.

We think all three “currencies” are valid and important and we are explicitly trying to build the platform and developer experience to support “profit” in each.

The last goal really points to our long term strategy. We hear from people that they want to be able to experience software no matter what screen they are using. The phone, the PC, or the TV. Combine this concept with “Software+Service” and it’s pretty obvious what “3 screens + cloud” means.

I mentioned in my last post that one of our principles was “to build upon the shoulders of giants; where possible integrate instead of create.” It won’t come as a surprise to many to learn that the Windows Phone 7 developer experience builds upon the following GIANTS (among others):

.NET
Silverlight
XNA platform
Microsoft’s developer tools
Web 2.0 standards

Different often means change. A quick glance at Amazon.com shows me there are literally hundreds of current books on how to manage change in organizations. We all know change can be hard. It’s hard even when you know there’s tremendous upside.

For us, the cost of going from good to great is a clean break from the past. To enable the fantastic user experiences you’ve seen in the Windows Phone 7 Series demos so far we’ve had to break from the past. To deliver what developers expect in the developer platform we’ve had to change how phone apps were written. One result of this is previous Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series.

To be clear, we will continue to work with our partners to deliver new devices based on Windows Mobile 6.5 and will support those products for many years to come, so it’s not as though one line ends as soon as the other begins.

The expertise and familiarity with our tools is not lost. If you are a .NET developer today your skills and much of your code will move forward. If you are Silverlight or XNA developer today you’re gonna be really happy. New developers to the platform will find a cohesive, well designed API set with super productive tools.

At MIX you will find out that it’s never been easier, more fun, or more rewarding to create beautiful & compelling phone experiences. Windows Phone 7 Series is a different kind of phone and the development platform offers a different kind of opportunity. Our mission is to help developers go after the next generation of mobile customers with an amazing set of tools and technologies. Developers will be able to bring new kinds of content to more screens and markets faster.

See you there.

P.S. If you like blogs, I suggest you follow these guys as well; they are all part of the extended team of people at Microsoft who are helping to deliver the new platform.

Andre Vrignaud: www.ozymandias.com / @ozymandias

Christian Schormann: electricbeach.org / @cschormann

Shawn Hargreaves: blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar / @shawnhargreaves

Todd Brix: windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone / @toddbrix

Anand Iyer: www.artificialignorance.net/blog / @ai

Michael Klucher: klucher.com / @mklucher

[Edit: 9:16PM PST 3/4/2010 - Fixed Christian's twitter handle]

Hello from San Francisco

Charlie Kindel (Kindel Systems) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:45:10 GMT

Focus, Focus, Focus

Charlie Kindel (Kindel Systems) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 02:01:52 GMT

The most successful product development projects are focused. Rarely do things go well for projects that try to do everything, meet every demand, support every scenario. This applies to building cars, skis, buildings, shampoo, as well as software.

I learned this the hard way. I’ve personally helped build products & technologies that did a lot of things “ok”. I’ve also been deeply involved in projects where we tried to build things without really understanding who we were building it for. I’ll be the first to admit that while DCOM is interesting and cool, we (I) didn’t _really_ understand who the customer was when we built it. It’s a classic “build it and they will come” project and in the end it was overly complex and underutilized.

One of the things that convinced me that I should give up my perfect job in running the Windows Home Server business and take a huge risk in joining the Windows Phone team was a strong commitment to clear prioritization & principles. When the Windows mobile organization was “reset” back in late 2008 it was clear that the new leadership had learned many of the same lessons I had learned and were deeply committed to not repeating history. In talking with Terry Myerson, Joe Belfiore, Henry Sanders, J Allard, and others I felt the passion for changing our game. I heard phrases like

“We will do a few things, and do them really, really well.”

“If you write a list write it in priority order.”

“Focus on the end user.”

“Don’t show our organizational boundaries to customers.”

Many people were pleasantly surprised with the user experience for Windows Phone 7 Series we showed off two weeks ago in Spain. I heard & saw comments to the effect of “Wow, this is not typical of Microsoft!”.

How did we do that? What’s the secret?

I’ll tell you: It’s being able to say “no”. It’s being able to get an entire organization setup to be able to not just say what they are going to build, but what they are not going to build.

A mentor of mine once taught me a trick to managing any sort of project. He used the “5Ps” as a framework:

Purpose: Why do we exist? Why are we in business? Where do we want to be in the future.
Principles: What are the non-negotiable rules and key strategies?
Priorities: What’s the framework for tradeoffs?
Plan: How are we going to stage and tackle solving the problems?
People: Who’s accountable for every key part of the plan?

It’s gratifying to see how this kind of framework can pay off. The readers of this blog will be in a position over the next few months to tell us if it’s paid off for the Windows Phone developer experience as it has for the user experience.

The developer experience team started with our purpose:

Our purpose is to harness the energy, talent, and attention of developers and designers with a platform and ecosystem that delivers on the developer experience end to end; that, combined with the phone’s end-user experience, results in a winning virtuous cycle.

We then wrote down a set of principles. Tenets or rules we would live by as we did our daily work. Frankly, I am not comfortable sharing all of our principles because I think they disclose too much of our long term strategy, and I’m not keen on letting our competitors know that. But I can tell you a few:

Every decision we make must be made mindful of the effect on end-users.
We will do a few things and do them very, very well; we are better off not having a capability than doing it poorly. There are always future versions.
No API will be created or documented without a clear use case; “build it and they will come” APIs almost always do nothing but create bad legacy.
We will build on the shoulders of giants; where possible integrate instead of create.
We will strive to not show our organizational boundaries to developers.

The most critical tool you can give small independent teams of creative people is a list of clear priorities. Such a list lets people make independent decisions rapidly knowing that they can justify those decisions later on.

To illustrate this I’ll call out something another mentor of mine taught me about leadership: “90% of the decisions don’t matter; real success comes in being able to identify the 10% that do and focus on them.”

For the Windows Phone developer experience we had several things to prioritize. For example, we prioritized the developer segments we would target:

Consumer Developer - Pro Devs who build products that are sold directly or given out for free to general public end-users.
Non-Pro Developer - Non-Pro Developers building products for academic/personal use.
In-ROM Developer - Pro Devs who build products & technologies that are sold to mobile operators or device manufacturers.
Enterprise Developer –Pro Devs who build apps & technologies that are sold to corporate clients and businesses.
IT Developer - Pro Devs who build apps & technologies that are only for use by their own corporation.

It may be pedantic, but it’s important to call out that the way you read a prioritized list like this is top down. Priority 1 is higher priority than priority 3, but that does not mean priority 3 isn’t important. It’s also worth calling out that prioritization is temporal. Over time (e.g. for subsequent releases) it is perfectly fine to change priorities. We did this with Windows Home Server. For the initial release the scenario priorities were:

For Power Pack 2 the priorities were adjusted:

Remote Access
Entertainment
Backup
Centralized Storage

For Windows Phone, we fully expect to adjust priorities in future releases.

Creating this list within the context of the overall Windows Phone strategy was fairly easy. Getting people to understand it and live it was harder. But once it was understood individuals, feature crews, and other groups could use this list to more easily identify which decisions & issues were in the 90% bucket and which were in the 10% bucket.

Continuing the example (and this is just one example meant to be illustrative) a feature crew deciding where to invest their time/resources could easily make tradeoffs.

“We know we can’t do both Feature A and Feature B because we can only do one of them really, really well. Feature A is something most useful to Enterprise Developers. Feature B is most useful to Consumer Developers. The decision to do Feature B is easy because we are supposed to prioritize Consumer Developers higher.��

The feature crew could make this decision independently of “management oversight” because the framework was clear. There was no need for seeking approval.

I don’t know of any secret to dealing with the “10%” bucket. It’s just hard work. But at least the noise is removed.

We had similar prioritizations for areas such as app types, technologies, scenarios, etc… This proved super helpful and really helped us to be able to say “no” as well as focus on was really important.

The plan was relatively easy to create. First we knew the overall top-down schedule for Windows Phone itself so that provided boundaries. We also knew there would be a MIX conference this spring. This gave us a great forcing function. Invite thousands of people to a big event and you better get your sh** together. By the way this is another trick another mentor of mine taught me: Events are great forcing functions for engineering teams.

Last, but not least, in the 5Ps framework is the people. One of the things that I’m most proud of, and most excited to see the real results of, in building Windows Phone 7 Series is how we’ve aligned an incredibly diverse set of people from across all of Microsoft to build the product. From the Xbox folks to the people in Developer Division. To people in Windows Live, Exchange, Windows, Office, and DPE.

My intent in writing this tome was to re-cap how we’re changing our game based on organizing and structuring our work in extremely focused ways. It starts with “end-user is king” and it’s not just about the phone user experience, but about the core changes we’re making to the phone ecosystem. Those changes are only possible through being extremely disciplined about principles and priorities.

Hopefully as we get closer to being able to show you all the details this will provide useful context and insights. My next post will be about the definition of “application”… I’ll try not to make it so long. :-)