The future of Story Creator

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A while ago we released a sample called Story Creator: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/CSWP7AzureVideoStory-2b9c3e12. It combines  several technologies, such as Windows Phone, Windows Azure, WCF, and C++. It is  a complete application that you can use and extend. But we're also aware of some limitations. For example, it is based on Windows Phone 7.0, not the latest Mango release. It doesn't offer too many features. However, do not worry. We don't stop here. We want to  continue to improve it, and provide more features.

In this blog post, I'll outline several potential features that may come in a  future release. Note I'm not promising anything here. This is just what we're trying to do.

The focuses on the next release are:

  • Upgrade to Windows Phone 7.1
  • Create a Windows 8 XAML version of the client application, using .NET (not C++)
  • Create a Windows 8 HTML version of the client application
  • Port the C++ native video encoding component (used in the worker role) to a custom WinRT component
  • Add some new features, such as caption text for each photo, and secondary tiles integration with Windows Phone/Windows 8
  • Fix bugs
  • Refactor code

Starting from now, I'll try to write some blog posts about how we implement  those new features. As soon as a sample application gets a little bigger, it is difficult to see how it works without documentations. These blog posts reflect the work I'm doing. But they may not directly reflect what the final sample application will be. In addition, I'm also learning. There're a lot of new technologies, and I think I still have a lot to learn about programming best practices. So bare with me if you see something that may not be a best practice. I'll be very appreciated if you can point out problems in these blog posts.

What's more, some of the blog posts may contain project attachments. These projects are NOT samples, but rather prototypes. Sometimes I'm unsure how to proceed to implement a certain feature, so I write prototypes before actually implementing it. The prototypes should in general work fine. But if you want to use them in your production code, you should check carefully to make sure they don't contain bugs, security issues, and performance is fine.

Finally, I don't know how many blog posts I will be writing. After all, this  sample is a side project. Usually I can only spend my spare time on it.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave comments on the blog posts.