My Windows Phone App – Hitman Website Monitor

This is a blog I wrote some years ago.  I am moving all my posts to this site and have added it for historical references only.

I was surprised at how easy it was to create and deploy a Windows Phone app. If you are a developer then you will have no problems creating an application. After I installed the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK alongside my Visual Studio 2010 installation, I created the project and got to work. You can download my Windows Phone app here.

The application is called ‘Hitman Website Monitor’. The free version, there is only a free version, allows you to manually monitor up to 4 websites using a response match. For example, you can create web page that makes connections to a database or validates a transaction and if they work, write OK to the page requested from the monitor.

One of the challenges I had when creating the Windows Phone App was the creation of the local database and performing the CRUD actions against it. I found a very good example on how to do this here. I used the MVVM model, as described in the article, within the Hitman Website Monitor.

Figure 1 shows the 3 pages that make up the Windows Phone App using the 7.1 SDK.

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Figure 1, Hitman Website Monitor created using Windows Phone 7.1 SDK

Install it and let me know what you think.

I also used the [Deployment.Current]LINK3 property to manage the transition between threads as I implemented the BeginGetRequestStream and BeginGetResponse methods to handle the request to the website.

NOTE: This Windows Phone App is not associated or supported by Microsoft. It was created just for fun to learn how to do it.

I am in the process of creating the same application as a Windows 8 App, Figure 2. I mentioned above the usage of MVVM and Deployment.Current specifically. In my Windows 8 App I was only able to store data locally using SQLite. There may be other options but I chose this one. I had to get fancy to bind the SQLite queries into the Sample Data Source provided when you create a Windows 8 Split App (XAML) Project. But I got it and it works fine.

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Figure 2, Hitman Website Monitor using the Visual Studio 2012 Split App (XAML) Project

The other thing is that I could not find Deployment.Current. I searched around and found that SynchronizationContext worked just fine for my needs.

Once I get the Windows 8 App published I will share it via another blog. I’ll also share when I upgrade this Windows Phone App to version 8.