We’re having a hackathon.

Some of you may remember the “publish” hackathons that Microsoft held last year. We’ve teamed up with the lovely people at UI Centric and taken inspiration from last years events to do something similar on Saturday April 18th.

We wanted create an event that is all about submitting to the store. Hence the name.
Tinkering with code and occasionally working towards releasing or updating an app is fine, but actually releasing something is much better. You learn more and other people can actually benefit from using it when your app has been released.

Many of us lead busy lives and finding the time to work on what are often side projects can be difficult. We recognise that having some specific time set aside, away from distractions, to work on your project can be really helpful and productive. That’s why we’ve created this event.

Whether you’re working on your first app or updating one of many apps you’ve had in the store for years you’ll be equally welcome.

And if you submit a new app or update on the day you’ll get:
– help submitting your app (if you need it)
– help with code or design (if you need it)
– food and drink (so you can concentrate on your app)
– somewhere to work without distraction. Power and WiFi provided.
– some goodies : but only if you submit!
– the chance to take home a new device : but only if you submit!

This isn’t an event to come and listen to talks at. It’s not a place to just hang out and chat. We want this to be a place where people are motivated to crack on and release and/or update apps.

Please register on meetup if you want to come and be sure to answer the questions on the registration page when you do sign up.

More than just beer and pizza!
Our meetings are typically held in the evening. Most people who attend come straight from work and so our meetings are at a time when they would normally be eating their evening meal.
We don’t want you to miss out and we know that you can’t buy any food in the rooms where we’re meeting at the moment. (Obviously this wasn’t the case when we were meeting in pubs and bars.)
Rather than leave people to get hungry or not come because they’d miss out on eating, we provide, courtesy of Microsoft, food and drink at our meetings.

Catering for large numbers of people isn’t straight forward and some of the ways in which everyone is different mean that through choice, belief or medical conditions not everyone can eat everything. Pizza and lager are the food and drink of choice for some but not everyone wants, or can, eat and drink them.

At our meetings we normally order a mix of pizzas with a range of sides. We also provide a wide variety of soft and alcoholic drinks.
When requested we’ve previously catered for vegetarians, vegans, coeliacs and more. We try our best to cater to everyone’s specific needs but, hopefully obviously, can’t always deal with every request. Especially if it is received at the last minute.

If you have any special requirements or requests please let us know when you register or email ‘info [at] windowsapps [dot] london’.

When it comes to Xamarin, we know many of you are interested but you also have lots of questions.
For this reason, this month we set out to try and get answers to some of those questions. When people registered we asked them what they wanted to know.
James Montemagno will be speaking and after analysing all your requests he’s come up with the following plan for what to talk about:

Leveraging C# and it’s awesome features to developer iOS and Android apps with Xamarin allows for rapid application development, but how can you go even further. In this session we will take a look at tools, libraries, and other resources to increase productivity enabling you to write less code and share more code across all of your apps. We will additionally dive through everything new in Xamarin.Forms and several tools that Forms has built in to help with cross platform development. No matter how you are developing applications with Xamarin you will be sure to find something new and fun to use on a day to day basis.

If you’re interested in coming and haven’t already done so, please register, so we know how many people to cater for. ;)

This month we’re going to be joined by Xamarin’s James Montemagno who’s visiting from Seattle.

What do you want to know about building apps with Xamarin?
Please let us know when registering or in the comments and James has agreed to talk about the topics that are most requested.

Garry has also volunteered to talk about his experience in taking the Xamarin certification exam. If that’s something you’re interested in doing too, he may have some useful tips for you.

And as ever, we’d love to hear about the apps you’ve been building. If you’re interested in demoing your and and sharing a little about your experience of building it please get in touch.

If you’re planning on coming please register on Meetup OR* Eventbrite so that we have an idea of how many to expect and can organise catering appropriately.

*There’s no need to register on both :)

Earlier this month @dvlup tweeted asking about the best local dev meetups.

Thanks to everyone who said such nice things about us:

While thinking about what’s coming in Windows 10 can be exciting, it’s also sometimes good to go back to basics and make sure we understand and are making best use of the tools we have available to us.

Visual Studio is a really powerful tool, with more features than I’m sure any of us realise, so this month, we’re going to have a look at some of them.

We’ll be joined by Mike and Peter from Microsoft and they’ll each be showing us 10 tips in a particular area of the program that will enable us to be more effective and build better apps with less effort
If you think you really know an area/feature of Visual Studio well and want to share your tips too then please get in touch as well. The more we share the more we all learn.

Windows 10 is looking to be a trigger that causes lots of people to build brand new apps or rebuild existing apps from scratch. Similarly, some of us will be building our first apps for Windows 10.
With this in mind it’ll be great if we can help each other avoid the mistakes of our past. If you’ve built any number of apps before then I’m sure you’ve learnt things in the process. What have you learnt that you wish you’d known when you started? By sharing these insights we’ll save each other time and help build even better apps.

All this plus the opportunity for app demos too. If you want to talk about your app then get in touch. Even if you don’t want to demonstrate it yourself but have released or updated an app lately, please leave the details below and we’ll spread the word about what you’re up to.

If you’re planning on coming please register on Meetup so that we have an idea of how many to expect and can organise catering appropriately.

Apparently there’s going to be a “significant” event related to Windows 10 on January 21st.
Come along and hear all the news and discuss what it could mean for you and the apps you’ve made or are thinking about.

As a group we’re all about helping everyone create great, successful apps and that means more than just hearing the latest news.

The benefit of meeting in person is that it’s easier to learn from other people directly. At this meeting we’d like to provide an opportunity to make it simple to meet and learn from others in attendance. As a way of doing this we’re going to have a “speed networking” session. It’s a simple, non-threatening, way of meeting similar people and learning from them. We hope you’ll take part.

We’d also like to learn from each other’s apps in a collective capacity. To do this we’d like to host another “Pimp my app” session. If you haven’t attended this previously it’s where someone volunteers their app to receive expert suggestions, comments and feedback to help make it better and this is shared with the group. If you’d like your app pimped please let us know in advance.

Additionally, as with past meetings, if you’ve got an app you want to demo or talk about we’d love to hear from you too.

If you’re planning on coming please register on Meetup so that we have an idea of how many to expect and can organise catering appropriately.

Or, if you’d prefer not to use meetup, you can also register your intent to come on: Eventbrite, Lanyrd, Twitter, KweekWeek, Microsoft Technical Communities, Google+ or Facebook.
There is absolutely no reason to register at more than one of the above. Just use whatever is the easiest for you.

If you were thinking about registering late (or just turning up on the day) for the publish hack originally scheduled for this Saturday, please be aware that his event has been postponed until the new year.
New date to be advised.

In December (17th), we’ll be joined again by Dominique Louis and Michael James from Xamarin.

They’ll be recapping the important announcements from the Evolve conference and show us how to make the most of taking an app that is currently on Windows Phone and using Xamarin’s tools reach other platforms too.

As ever there’ll be an opportunity for you to share or demo what you’ve been working on too. Please get in touch if you have something to show.

Plus there will be food, drink and plenty of networking opportunities.

If you’re planning on coming it help us plan if you can please register.

At the end of September Microsoft announced Windows 10– the next version of Windows.
This has implications for everyone building apps for Windows and Windows Phone (or who’s thinking about it).

We’ll look at what’s been said, what hasn’t, and make some reasonable assumptions about what we can take from this. We’ll start with a presentation but then open into a discussion about what developers and designers can do now. Come share your thoughts, plans and ideas, plus hear what others are thinking.

We’ll also look at the tools we’ll be using to build apps for Windows 10 – Visual Studio 14 and C#6.0.

And of course there will be the usual food, drink and networking.

Register on MeetUp