Phil Japikse, Michael Crump and I set out to create three related applications from scratch. That is, a Windows 8 version written in XAML with C# (me), a Windows 8 version written in JavaScript (Phil) and a Windows 8 Phone version (Michael). 
The idea behind the application was summed up in an email by Phil, paraphrased here:
- The main goal of the application is to show off the Telerik controls
- The business purpose of the application is to allow Telerik Evangelists to gather information from conference attendees
The design will allow us to:
- Enter demographic information for raffle registration
- Enter demographic information for follow ups
- Tag one or more products for follow up
- Enter information on problem reports
- Enter information for product suggestions
We knew we wanted expert design help for the UI/UX aspect, but to get us started we met briefly to mock-up what we had in mind. The goal was not to show how the UI would look (that would be up to the designers) but rather to show the kind of information we wanted to gather. We used MockUpScreens, working with a shared screen over Skype.
In the upper right corner you see an example of one of the screens (click on the image to see full size). Of course, with Windows 8, rather than having multiple screens and navigation controls to move between them, we may create one very wide screen that the user can swipe across (much like the weather app that comes with Windows 8).
From here we will give these mock-ups to the designers who will return wire-frames of the look and feel of the application.
The next step is to create the model: the persistence layer of classes or tables that will hold the data we collect. This should be almost totally automatic once we have the wireframes.
It is my intention to document every step of the creation of the XAML/C# version of this application, including design decisions (and mistakes!) and the process of taking an application from conception through making it ready for the Windows Store. That is my intention; we’ll see how it goes!
