W00TSOFT

I’m nearing completion of my first Windows Phone 7 application. I’ve dubbed it “OceanData.” What does it do? Well it provides ocean data, duh! What kind of data? Right now it’s just tide and buoy information. It provides tide predictions for about 4500 locations mosting in the US and some in select locations internationally and buoy data for just shy of 300 buoys. It utilizes the WP7 “pivot” control as well as many of the other built in controls to keep the look and feel of the OS. Very soon I plan on adding support for live tiles (so it will give you the current situation without even launching the app) and some of the other features of Windows Phone 7 such as better theming support and GPS.

Here’s a video of it in action. Let me know what you think! Look for it in the Windows Phone Marketplace at or shortly after launch.

Ok well this isn’t really my first but it’s the first one that I’ll actually have ready and in the Marketplace.  It’s a Silverlight application that will use the Pivot control (or maybe Panorama?) to allow you to check out some various data sources for ocean information.  At first it began as just a mobile interface to xTide, practically the only source for tide data.  The dirty little secret is that EVERYONE uses xTide.  Surfline? Yup.  TideApp for iPhone and Android? Yup.  Plenty of others I’ve noticed too.  It utilizes harmonic data for tons of locations worldwide to “predict” the tides/current at that location.  Even the US NOAA seems to use it.  The problem is it comes in three forms; a command line, web interface (not XML or any other readily machine-readable format), or a GUI… all are made for ‘posix’ style systems.  There is a Windows binary available but it just spits out data in formats that aren’t that great to consume.  So what’s a dev to do?

First I Google’d (and Bing’d, ya never know) for a web service I could point to and just consume.  The NOAA seems to have one but they only have it for the “reference” locations and not all the spots in between, that’s not gonna work.  So I ended up going the route of rolling my own.  Basically I wrote a wrapper that calls the xTide binary and spits it back out to a web service.  Turns out, it seems to work quite well.  But I’m not gonna be able to host this thing so next up was the search for a hosting provider.  Azure? Too expensive, even with my MSDN Premium subscription.  Sorry Microsoft, Azure sucks for most people.  Godaddy/etc? While they offer windows hosting (I need windows as the web service is .net) they don’t allow you to run non-managed code, which of course the xTide app is.  Doh!  The problem goes back to “medium trust” in IIS/ASP.net.  Only full trust allows you to run non-managed code.  The problem is that very few hosting providers allow full trust.  It took me a while but I found one that did! Yay!

So now I’ve got my web service up and running, what next? Well write something to consume it.  I don’t care what the homer MVPs and Microsoft people say, the Windows Phone 7 dev tools are not up to snuff yet.  I plan on using panorama/pivot and the Bing maps control, both of which will be released with the final build of the dev tools.  Why am I going to write my app only to have to rewrite half the thing when the tools RTM? Oh but if you write your app properly, you will only need to rewrite the display portion they say.  Well my app is using a web service to do the backend so practically the only stuff in the app is the display logic! But I still want to validate my web service and get something to show off.

Enter Silverlight.  The cool thing is, it didn’t take me that long to make this.  The web service was most of my time.  And I should be able to copy and paste much of the code for the WP7 version.  I dunno, maybe I’ll finish it and make it a legit tool of it’s own?  Maybe I’ll try and get it in the Bing Maps explorer (have to rework it for that)?  It’s definitely not finished… it’s not pulling the buoy data right (and I need to clean up the locations I think) and it’s not using the weather stuff but the tide data is there. I plan on expanding the display of it greatly.  I have a lot of ideas for the WP7 app and they’ll be a lot less effective on the desktop.  Once I have something on the phone to show off (probably in a few weeks) I’ll post it up here.

But here’s the Silverlight app. Any thoughts?  Hopefully I’m able to get it done pretty quickly and in the Marketplace.  I’d love for it to become the defacto standard for this sort of data. 

And if you’re a dev and you want to use my web service, just ask!  I plan on sticking in some sort of API key just so random leeches don’t start hitting it if it gets found.  I’m going to look into expanding it beyond tides/buoys/weather as well.  Maybe something like surf reports?  Maybe I could get someone like surfline to let me use their data?  Once I get it all working I suppose I’ll send off some emails to try to convince them. 

Anyways, I’m pretty excited for the things to come.  I was really hoping to get access to a dev phone but Microsoft didn’t think my ideas were good enough.  If I did I would’ve also gotten access to the controls I need and this thing would be pretty much done. Oh well.

Soo I’m not completely sure what I’m going to use this for (or if I’ll use it).  As of right now this will mostly just be used to host my web services for my Windows Phone 7 (and other) apps. Maybe I’ll post some random, more personal stuff (like about my obsession with UCF football) but I’ll probably keep it mostly ‘professional’ and nerdy.