Attention webOS Developers: Here Is The Message From Microsoft To You All

As you all know Microsoft is keen on providing necessary resources  and guidance for webOS developers in getting started with Windows Phones. Brandon Watson, Director of Developer Experience got over 1000 emails so far from the webOS developer community regarding developing for Windows Phones. He has been busy for the past two days in preparing to reply them all. Here is the email sent out to all the webOS developers. You can share it with your webOS friends ! !

EMAIL :

“First things first. Thank you so much for reaching out to the Windows Phone team to signal your interest in bringing your talents to our platform. To be honest, we didn’t expect this level of response, so we were caught a bit flatfooted. It took a few days (on the weekend) to pull all the mails together into one place to allow me to respond in a smart way and not retype every mail by hand.  Consider this a first step in building a relationship with the Windows Phone team.  We are psyched to have you aboard and to see what your imagination can do on the Windows Phone canvas.

Getting Started With Windows Phone

First things first.  Thank you so much for reaching out to the Windows Phone team to signal your interest in bringing your talents to our platform.  To be honest, we didn’t expect this level of response, so we were caught a bit flatfooted.  To avoid retyping the same mail over and over again, we spent the extra time to load the mails into our CRM system so we could ensure we were following up with each of you.

Here are some of the common questions we have received: Where do you get the tools?  What is the App Hub?  How do you submit apps?  Where can I get a phone?

We pulled together a set of links to get you going on your path.  You will find that content in a table at the bottom of the mail.  It should get you well on your way, and we have a great community of MVP support, which can be found on the App Hub forums, or on Twitter (#wpdev is the hashtag).

Insofar as training, we have arranged to have a 2 day, live, streamed training event about how to build apps for Windows Phone.  It is coming up this week.

Registration: http://bit.ly/Mango-Jump

It’s important to note that while this will be delivered live and streamed, but that we will also be posting the recorded version of the videos online shortly after the completion of the training event.

Students

If you are a student developer, your best first stop is to contact Ben Lower on our team.  He is spearheading the academic efforts for Windows Phone.  His email is [email protected] and his twitter is @BenLower.

Mobile Champs

Our mobile champs are our developer evangelists in your area.  They are empowered to do whatever it takes to make you successful.  They will have invites to in person Windows Phone training events, access to coding resources, will be able to introduce you to our marketing programs once your apps are in Marketplace, and they have phones and tokens for App Hub accounts (if cost of an account is a hardship).  Here’s the list of champs

Country	Mobile Champ & Email
Australia	Chris Bright [email protected] Dave Glover (DPE MELBOURNE) [email protected]
Austria	Andreas Schabus [email protected] Max Knor [email protected]
Belgium	Katrien De Graeve [email protected] David Hernie [email protected]
Brazil	Silvia Valadares [email protected] Caio Chaves Garcez [email protected]
Canada	Paul Laberge [email protected] Joey DeVilla [email protected]
Chile	Wilson Pais [email protected]
China	Liwei Zhao [email protected] Felix Yan [email protected] Simon Duan [email protected]
Czech Republic	Filip Rehorik [email protected]
Columbia	Walter Novoa (Adecco) [email protected] Ricardo Marulanda [email protected]
Denmark	Bjarne Dollerup [email protected]
Finland	Jukka Wallasvaara [email protected]
France	Antoine Markarian [email protected] Pierre Cauchois [email protected] Alex Danvy [email protected]
Germany	Frank Prengel [email protected] Bernhard Carli [email protected]
Greece	Gina Tiriakidou [email protected]
Hong Kong	Andy Cheung (HK DPE) [email protected]
Hungary	Zsolt Batorfi [email protected]
India	Girish C Joshi [email protected]
Indonesia	Irving Hutagalung [email protected]
Ireland	Dave Northey [email protected]
Italy	Roberto Cavallini [email protected] Lorenzo Barbieri [email protected]
Japan	Shinobu Takahashi [email protected] Akira Onishi [email protected]
Korea	Jinho Seo [email protected] Kyoung Yoon Kim [email protected]
Malaysia	Hoong Fai Lai [email protected]
Mexico	Edgar Omar Aviles Rosas [email protected]
Netherlands	Matthijs Hoekstra [email protected]
New Zealand	Nigel Parker [email protected] Mike Zeff [email protected]
Norway	Petri Tapio Wilhelmsen [email protected]
Philippines	Zandra Nicolas [email protected]
Poland	Bartlomiej Zass [email protected]
Portugal	Nuno Silva [email protected]
Puerto Rico	Yamille Morales [email protected]
Russia	Mik Chernomordikov [email protected] Vladimir Kolesnikov [email protected]
Singapore	Chris Ismael [email protected]
South Africa	Nyaladzi Mpofu [email protected]
Spain	Isabel Gomez Miragaya [email protected] Elisa Garcia Anzano [email protected]
Sweden	Dag König [email protected]
Switzerland	Stefano Malle [email protected] Sascha Corti [email protected]
Taiwan	Eric ShangKuan [email protected]
Thailand	Ekaraj Kongswangwongsa [email protected]
UK	William Coleman [email protected] Paul Foster [email protected] Mike Ormond [email protected]
US	Joe Shirey [email protected] Reza Alizadeh [email protected] Christian Thilmany [email protected] Max Zilberman [email protected] Rob Cameron [email protected]

Phones

We have phones for developers committed to building apps and games for Windows Phone.  This isn’t a free ride program where we just hand out phones to people because they say they want one.  When you connect with your local champ, you are building a relationship that will hopefully last a long time.

We have current retail phones, and in the coming weeks/months, we will have updated Mango retail hardware phones.  We also have prototype Mango devices (which have the gyros not available on current retail devices), so if you are building an app which requires Mango hardware, you can make an ask of those as well.

Online Resources

Topic	What is it?	Link
App Hub	The central repository for all things Windows Phone for developers.  This is where you will go to create an account, get the tools, submit and manage your apps, participate in forums, etc.	http://create.msdn.com
Getting Started	Your first stop to get going on dev	http://wpdev.ms/startwpdev
Downloads	The dev tools – FREE – are here	http://wpdev.ms/wpdowns
Registration	Some people need a little extra help, and this walkthrough of the developer registration should be useful	http://wpdev.ms/regwalk
Submissions	A little extra help on the submission process.	http://wpdev.ms/subwalk
Certification Requirements	OK, your app is done, but will it pass cert?  We aim to give you plenty of visibility into the process and be very transparent on why your apps failed, but please read through this.	http://wpdev.ms/certreq
Jump Start	A video series sponsored by Channel9, our developer focused online video destination portal.	http://wpdev.ms/jumpstarts
Design Day	Every developer could probably use a little extra help with their app design.  Here are some great tutorials all about the Metro UI design language for Windows Phone.	http://wpdev.ms/designday
Absolute Beginners	There’s always the possibility that you are big on ideas, but maybe not so much on dev skills.  That’s OK.  We have a great course which will get you up to speed even if you are an absolute beginner.	http://wpdev.ms/beginvids
Mango Hands On Labs	If you want to dig a little deeper, but prefer the lab walkthrough format, we have some great labs here for you.	http://wpdev.ms/mangohol

	brandon watson | sr. director
windows phone apps
@brandonwatson
+1(425) 985-5568

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