WP7 development vs BlackBerry development

As you might already know I developed a BlackBerry application called Mobholicavailable on appworld
I wasn’t a pro in Java when I did that, but had the basics and knew c# very well.
The development experience was literally hell; well for one reason I’ve been used to something a lot better!

Here are a few points I think BlackBerry should improve:

* The BlackBerry Plug-in freezes a lot upon launch time (at least once every 3 times) and during normal development.
* Work on their views implementation; even if it’s Java they should work on something similar to Android in order to really separate the view and make it easier / more professional to develop on.
* Documentation is poor its been there for years now whereas in a matter of months the Android documentation ousted it in quality and quantity.
* Appworld should do more testing on the applications; I’ve seen applications on the featured list completely freeze or never worked once on my mobile.
* Appworld’s minimum application fee should be less than 2.49 euros!!! (this is beneficial for everyone!)

Now to be less negative, I’ve been working on Windows Phone 7 applications, the development experience is just 100 times better than the BlackBerry experience I had.
Richer tools are available for us (you can get them for free here) like VS 2010 Express and Expression Blend for Windows Phone 7 Beta

Training kit available for both gamers and normal application developers (XNA and Silverlight) available here.

I wrote a simple none technical article for the company I work for demonstrating a Proof of Concept of the first application I developed on WP7 for Renault. (the application has more functionalities and has changed a bit since)

If you’re an Android / BlackBerry developer I really invite you to check out the technical posts I wrote on developing on Windows Phone 7 available through this blog(specially the one with MVVM – since this is the hype,hot topic right now in .net development).

WP7 development still has a few missing things comparing to BlackBerry.
With BlackBerry I was able to access the phone’s calendar/ tasks etc..directly from the application; and I still can’t from a WP7 application.
Here’s the list of things you can do though: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff428753(v=VS.92).aspx