Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

Last week I ended up getting up at about 3:30am and couldn’t sleep. So I did what any self respecting nerd would do. I went upstairs, opened up Visual Studio, and started making my first Windows Phone 7 program. I really wanted to create a program to be able to read the Mac address and display it easily from the phone. I quickly realized that the Silverlight functionality available on the phone is incredibly limited. By incredibly it’s really very pathetic. I would say it’s the most closed ecosystem of any mobile phone on the market, with exception to BlackBerry, but even then I haven’t dived into BlackBerry programming since the 8000 series.

It was fine enough to be able to use the emulator for phone development, but since I have a real phone I wanted to dive right into using things I create directly on my device. That’s when I discovered the App Hub. It’s basically like Apple’s development program where you have to pay $99 plus tax to join their little programming community/marketplace. With that cost you you are entitled to exactly one year of membership, and access to using a development device. This is where Apple and Microsoft take a sharp turn away from each other. With Apple it’s a one time yearly fee for complete access to the marketplace, documentation, code development environments (Xcode), SDK’s, and ability use development profiles on your physical devices. Microsoft on the other hand requires a background check to even get started. Microsoft didn't mention this until AFTER I paid them.

I failed the immediate background check. This is the second time I've failed to prove that I am me. It was asking questions related to my mortgage bank, my student loan bank, and what my monthly mortgage rate is. Well, first the mortgage bank list didn’t display my bank, my student loans were paid off/bank not listed, and none of the listed monthly mortgage rate range were even close to mine. Instead of a quick check it’s turned into a week long wait, having to fax a copy of my drivers license, and just today was granted access to start using my device for programming.

Talk about a buzz kill. Nothing like waiting a week with NO status updates to kill my enthusiasm. First the device is incredibly limited in access to physical functionality, and then jumping through hoops even to use the device I paid hard-cash to own really just puts it over the top from being sad to pathetic. Still, I am happy to see they finally agreed I am me, and now from this day forward I actually feel the $100+ dollars I paid to get denied was at least worth _something_. I’m hoping to push out a few project ideas and at least get a bullet point on the resume that I’ve made Phone 7 applications.