Hi folks, I’m Jonathan, the PM Lead for the Windows Phone Tools and SDK team. A wise man once said “your code’s as good as your people, and your people are as good as their tools.” We believe that great tools help great people write great apps. To that end, I’m excited to share this post with you from Rahul Bagaria covering Simulation Dashboard.
Phone apps need to be designed and developed to manage a variety of different conditions that are common in daily life, such as changing network conditions, intermittent network failures, and unexpected phone interruptions. Building and testing apps under lab conditions does not ensure that they will behave well in real-life conditions or handle unexpected user behavior appropriately. There can be many problems which the apps face in real life, such as:
· Crashes due to unhandled network interruptions in flow of data
· Unresponsiveness due to large downloads over slow networks
· Media playback jitters on high-latency networks
· Games continuing in background unaware of a phone call received by user
Currently, you cannot validate your app's performance and functionality in all such conditions during development, which can lead to disappointing user experiences and negative reviews in the Store. However, the new Windows Phone SDK 8.0 addresses these types of conditions through the introduction of Simulation Dashboard. It lets you validate in advance how your app will behave in real life conditions. You can simulate various network conditions and phone interruptions from the dashboard and tweak your app to ensure that it behaves well under these conditions. All this will lead to satisfied users and good reviews!
Simulation Dashboard
The following image shows the options available for the dashboard.
· You can simulate different network conditions with custom settings of Network Speed and Signal Strengths (network speed and quality will be limited by the actual network of the development environment).
· You can trigger the Lock Screen on the Windows Phone emulator or device to validate how the app manages its state under Activated/Deactivated events.
· You can trigger Reminders to validate an app's behavior when it is interrupted and partially obscured with Obscured/Unobscured events.
Want to know more about the Simulation Dashboard and see what all can you do with it? Let’s explore the various scenarios using a typical photo app. This app allows you to browse your Flickr account pictures, play them in a slideshow, and even upload Instagram-style artified images from within the app. (Check out the PhotoSlydr app, which was optimized using the steps outlined here.)
About the Demo App
You will first have to register with Flickr and get a personal API Key which you can use in your app to use Flickr APIs and create your own Flickr client. For more information, see The Flickr developer guide: API. Our typical app has the following design, which we will validate under real-life conditions:
· Select a photo album f