"Android and Windows phone app development" 

A 

 Comparison

 
Do you feel like an alien when you see windows app and its IDE.Don't worry even i felt so in my initial phase of  learning about windows app.Now let us see whether your are eligible for windows phone app development.Ask yourself the following questions

*Am i good in UI design of android?
*Am i confident in webservice technology?
*do i have basic knowledge of c# and xaml?
*Am i willing to learn a new technology?

If the answer is "YES" let us proceed.Here i am not dealing with all complicated stuffs of programming,what i am doing is just giving you a brief introduction.The easiest way to learn this beautiful technology of Microsoft is by comparing what we know about android development with windows app development.

Let us look on to the IDE.For android app development,we use Eclipse(configured for android app development) or android studio.We have a lot of other IDEs from various vendors but as far as the Google documentation is concerned the above mentioned IDEs are officially recognized.For windows phone  app development we use "Visual Studio for windows phone" and surprisingly this is a free software from Microsoft.There are various versions  available in the market like VS for windows phone 2010,2012 etc, and you can use any one of it depending on your requirement because  VS for windows phone 2010 support app development for windows phone OS versions up to 7.2 only.

Now let us see UI design of windows app,We use XAML for designing UI which is much similar to XML that we use for android app's UI design.If we are friendly with WCF , WPF or Windows 8 applications of windows XAMLwont be a Latin word for you.We will look into this later.Even though we use JAVA as the development language for android(According to Google documentation),we can also use HTML and JavaScript(Phone gap) or C# (Xamarin plugin and ofcourse it is a paid plugin). In case of Windows phone app we use C# as the development language and if you have any previous experience in using C#,with no doubt start developing windows phone apps.

If you see the the mobile app market let it be playstore,appstore or itunes there is a similarity between majority of applications,that is most of them are webservice oriented.Whatever technology you use there is a generalized method for implementing webservice.Since Windows also support JSON and XML,it is not an issue.