TouchDevelop for Windows Phone: Write code for your phone on your phone!

October 14, 2011
Nikolai Tillmann and Jonathan ‘Peli’ de Halleux | Microsoft Research

TouchDevelop is a new a software development environment that runs on the Windows Phone itself, no separate PC required. From the ground up, TouchDevelop has been designed for touchscreen devices, targeting non-professional developers. TouchDevelop comes with a typed, structured programming language that allows rich auto-completion, a code editor customized for touchscreen and big fingers, an execution engine that deals seamlessly with tombstoning, and an easy-to-use built-in API to access web services and rich sensor data available on the Windows Phone. Scripts can take pictures, explore your media library, map your location, access external web services, use a built-in physics engine to implement a game, or simply tell you the current time in a random language. You can publish scripts on the script bazaar to share them with other people. Visit www.touchdevelop.com to see all the scripts that other people have published already. Using TouchDevelop on your own Windows Phone, we will guide you while you write your first script. We will discuss how developing scripts with TouchDevelop relates to advanced app development with Visual Studio. TouchDevelop, developed by Microsoft Research, is available for free on the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Speaker Details

Nikolai Tillmann is a Principal Research Software Design Engineer in the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, USA, where he has been since January 2001. After working on modeling techniques and tools in the AsmL and Spec Explorer projects, he worked on automatic test case generation in the Pex project, which lead to the www.Pex4Fun.com learning and teaching platform. In the SPUR project, he developed a prototype of a tracing JIT for .NET. Most recently, he started the TouchDevelop project to enable programming directly on mobile devices. http://research.microsoft.com/~nikolait

Jonathan ‘Peli’ de Halleux is a Senior Research Software Design Engineer in the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, USA, where he has been since January 2006, working on the Pex and Moles projects (test generation and isolation for .NET), www.Pex4Fun.com (teaching platform), and www.RiseForFun.com (web platform showcasing research tools), and TouchDevelop (programming directly on mobile devices). From 2004 to 2006, he worked in the Common Language Runtime (CLR) as a Software Design Engineer in Test (SDE/T) in charge of the Just In Time compiler. Earlier, he developed the unit testing framework MbUnit. Before joining Microsoft, Peli earned a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Catholic University of Louvain (2000-2004). http://research.microsoft.com/~jhalleux