WinPhone7 needed for a porting?

I have an android app with more than 500,000 users. I want to try to port it to WinPhone7, but I haven't any smartphone with WinPhone7. Is a real device needed to publis开发者_Python百科h an app on WinPhone? Is there some developper phone?

First of all, I will say that for some scenarios, there is no real substitute for have a physical device to test against. Having said that, I would suggest that 99% of what most apps will do can be developed and test perfectly well on the emulator that comes with the developer tools.

The advantage of the emulator is that you can write and test without shelling out for the hardware and then signing up to create.msdn.com to get it (officially) unlocked, but once you are ready to deploy to the marketplace you will need to sign up anyway.

In your case, I'd say the main word in your question is "try". You don't seem confident in being able to port to the platform so the emulator route seems like the best starting point.

Your will find a Windows Phone 7 emulator in the Windows Phone SDK. You can download it for free on create.msdn.com.

There is an Android to Windows Phone API mapping tool and Windows Phone 7 Guide for Android Application Developers white paper as described on the Windows Phone Developer Blog that you should find very useful.

For getting a development device, you should reach out to Brandon Watson or your local Microsoft WP7 dev rep.

Simple answer - no, you don't. There are plenty of applications out there that were published without being tested on an actual device. Whether it's a good idea or not - that is the main question here. Depending on your application type and its behavior, you might actually need a device.

Also, another problem is the fact that the resources used by the emulator are different from the resources used by the actual device. That being said, if your application runs just fine in the emulator, it will not necessarily run the same way on a device.

You can use the WP7 emulator to test your application. But if you want to deploy it on a real phone, you will have to unlock it though the App Hub portal. That will cost you 100 dollar/year though.

As you and others have rightly pointed out, you can start porting your application using the emulator. There are differences in the emulator and real devices. In particular, to answer your question, emulator does not take pictures.

If your Android app really has half a million users, MS will happily give you a developer device (nearly) for free.

Contact @BrandonWatson or @FrankPR on Twitter.

From my experience I can tell you, that the emulator works very well. But once in a while you will stumble about a problem that you don't understand why it happens. Then you try it on the phone and it works... So... The answer is yes...not!