WMPoserUser posted some interesting stats on what capabilities applications are requesting.  Interesting stuff, but they clearly haven’t published an app, or at least not an ad supported app.

First let me say that I have only published a single app so far, so I’m not some amazing expert.  My app, Chess Tactics, doesn’t actually need any capabilities by itself.  That being said I have quite a few capabilities listed.  Most of these capabilities are required by Microsoft

A response to a request for everyone to share how they got started down the road to become software developer.

I wrote my first code on a Kaypro II.  My mother bought it around 1987, and there were 2 things you could do on it.  You could use the word processor (I think it was WordStar) or you could program in some variant of BASIC.  I did a little of both.

Background

The idea for this article came from two places:

I’m writing an application that gets all of its data from a WCF service. Each time I call the WCF service, I end up having to write a bunch of duplicate code and of course I don’t like to type, so I was trying to find a way to not have to write that code.

The app I’m developing is an internal business application, and we release weekly. Each release to the WCF services could be incompatible with the previous client. That means that I need to do the release during off hours. I don’t like working nights, so I wanted to find a way to have multiple copies of the service running and have the client choose which service to access based on its version

A quick word about app reviews:

• Most people don’t review.  I average about 1000 ad impressions a day.  In other words users are playing 1000 minutes a day.  So there are people who are using Chess Tactics but are not reviewing it.  There have been about 1500 downloads, and only 8 reviews in the US.
• Most reviews are not that helpful.  I have a handful of reviews that are on the low-end with no indication about what they don’t like.  Either they left it blank

The Visual Studio team just announced that the Visual Studio 11 will have the same hardware requirements as Visual Studio 2010.  So, we’re getting more features, they’ve improved the performance throughout (yes, I am using it and the differences are obvious in places), and we could run it on yesterdays hardware, but we’re likely to have upgraded since then so faster still.