How to Manage Deployment/Upgrades for Internal Mobile Application? - win-universal-app

I'm creating a UWP application that will be used exclusively on rugged Win10 tablets by a group of initially 10-20. If things go well it will be expanded to 100 users. These users are employees of our company, but will be remotely located.
Currently, with the test tablets, I am pushing the packages in google drive and manually copying them to the tablets, unzipping and executing the ps file on the tablet. This is way to complicated for even a beta test group of our users.
I'm looking for short-term/long-term recommendations for deployment. Someone mentioned SCCM to me and I've read a little, but that seems like quite a major endeavor to host. I would prefer something like a "private store" concept, but I can't find anything like that.

You can create a private store for your company. The best solution is probably to use Windows Store for Business. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/business-store
Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) accounts for your employees are needed if you select this solution.
An alternative way is to use HockeyApp http://hockeyapp.net to deploy your application.

According to your description, HockeyApp should meet your requirement. Via HockeyApp, you can upload and distribute builds for beta or enterprise distribution using our web UI, or our API. HockeyApp also supports build servers like Jenkins or Visual Studio Team Services. Don't forget to upload your dSYM or
mapping.txt to get readable crash reports.
With HockeySDK for UWP integrated, you can also:
Integrate our open-source SDK to:
Collect crash reports
Show update alerts for new beta builds
Add a feedback view directly into your app
For more information, please visit support.hockeyapp.net.

Related

How Can I setup Google Actions For Team Development?

I am working with a team to develop a Google Action for an Organisation called 'Rocket Chat'. Now what we want to do is that, to create one main account under that organisation, where frontend and backend will be hosted and also give access of this account to a few Developers. What will be the most efficient way of doing this?. Any ideas or suggestions on how to do that are appreciated. Thanks.
Frontend is hosted on Dialogflow and for backed we are hosting our fulfilment on Firebase. If you want more details on our setup, please visit here => https://github.com/RocketChat/google-action-rocketchat
The "correct" way to do it would be for every developer to use their own account, and share a project with all of them. This also will allow you to have more granular permissions for each developer.
In addition to having ownership of the project, you may also want to have some processes in place to mitigate potential issues. If everyone uses one project, it's possible to run into race conditions if multiple developers upload the same cloud function. The Dialogflow console also may have issues with multiple editors at one time.
For easier development, each developer may want their own separate prototyping project which gives them full control over the environment, and then have some way to integrate their changes into one master project.

Delivering a Website as a Product

I apologize if this is a weird question but i can't really find good information regarding this.
I have a website that I would like to deliver as a product for other organizations to download and use within their organization. Much like Confluence or Wordpress. I know how they do it, they just package up their code and you can download it and deploy it yourself, however I'm just wondering what the other options are out there.
Is there a way to bundle up the entire site into an installer or create an image of some sort that can be downloaded and deployed. Ideally, I wouldn't want the customer to deploy the code and configure it themselves. It would be nice for them to just have to download something, run it and its up.
Any process or tool recommendations is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
A solution that I was looking for is something like Docker. https://www.docker.com/
You can build a docker image that basically has all the prerequisites for your application built into it and you can deploy it across most machines that have docker install.
Even with confluence server, you still have to, at the minimum, configure a database, a home folder (for the product logs, plugins, cache), and the server itself to host the confluence product.
If you want to have the customer just use the product, then you should be hosting the whole product from your side and the customer can just create an instance for their company on your product (e.g. confluence cloud, Basecamp, workplace by facebook).
So, for these products that use the cloud solution, I only have to signup for an account, I don't need to handle any server side configuration or database as these are handled by your product hosting. But in the end it depends on what is your product and who are you targeting.
If you are targeting enterprise customers who do not want their data hosted in the cloud and want to have their own firewall, then you will need a server product. Nevertheless, these companies which have their own servers will also have IT admins who can handle the installation and configuration for your product as long as its well documented and easy to follow.

White-Label a UWP Application

I am about to start development on an UWP Application. One of the last minute requirements was to be able to support white-labeling the application for our partners. Does anyone have any experience doing this using the Universal Windows Platform that would be willing to give me some insight on resources I should be looking at?
Some basic questions I have is:
Is it possible? I read about it being done with iOS and Android.
How do you create the AppPackage for each partner?
Localization differences? Where one localization may refer to it as one product, but another refers to it as the other product.
Or is this something where I would bundle everything up and send it to the partner to create their own upload? If this is the case, is there a how-to on that?
Some of these might be basic questions, but this is the first time I have created a white-label application, so it is all new to me.
Have just replied to another one topic and looks that screenshot is still needed)
When you submit App to store you can find option:
This way you can make your app visible only to your partners. And you can also register as many apps as you like (each one for separate partner)
Or you can distribute your app thrue Windows Store for Business.
Take a look also at this link, it might be helpful for you
Distribute LOB apps to enterprises

Windows 10 universal app cross app communication availability

I am an WPF developer with little knowledge for the way "mobile" apps work but in general I believe that they work in some sort of sandbox way (meaning they should not be able to access each others process, info etc., I might be totally incorrect on this one). So I am wondering if such "limitations" are applied to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps?
The reasoning for my question is that I would like to write and app that checks if another Universal App is in process and use some of its information. In WPF there are ways of doing just that but in UWP apps I am not sure if it is/should/will be possible.
Thanks.
There are a couple of solutions in Windows 10. Firstly, if you are building an enterprise app and can also side-load normal Desktop apps, you can use this technique to build your UI as a UWP but also be able to break out of the sandbox and do other things on the desktop.
Secondly, if the app you want to read from is cooperative (ie, is designed to provide information; you're not just grabbing it without permission) then you can use App to App services to send and receive information between two consenting applications.
Both links are to //build videos but you can download the slides too that should contain code samples.

Windows 8/RT + Phone 8 app - sync data

Hi im developing a todo/reminder app for both Windows 8 (RT) and Windows Phone 8.
I want to enable the user to sync their todo-items between these two.
I know there is a roaming application data storage for Windows 8, but is it possible to access it from the phone?
Another idea i had was creating an xml file and uploading it to skydrive, but then i would have no push functionality :(
And there is also Azure which seems to be the most complicated solution..
What way is the best to choose?
Thanks for your help
You can use Live SDK (SkyDrive) and Windows Azure Mobile Services to accomplish this. The Live SDK will allow you to upload and retrieve items from SkyDrive and you can use mobile services for push notifications. Here is an example of what you want to do.
I know that the thread is a bit old, but it still pops up in search results. So, here's the answer.
I had exactly the same problem. So, I have developed a small library which does exactly that - synchronizing the data between Windows Phone and Windows Azure. Code is on GitHub and here is a nicely packed NuGet package. You could easily port it to WinRT and use SQLite as local data storage.
API is very simple. You just call methods to do CRUD operations and when you are done, you call SynchronizeAsync to synchronize data with WAMS. The synchronization goes both ways. In case of conflict, the latest copy gets the preference.
In the meantime Windows Phone 8.1 is released and it changes the answer to your question - today there are universal apps and they share the same roaming storage on both Phone and regular Windows.
You're going to want to use Mobile Services (www.windowsazure.com/mobile) for this scenario. After you login at manage.windowsazure.com, grab the WinStore C# SDK and WP8 SDK. You're going to need to point both to the same SQL db and Mobile Service. Of course, if you need blob or table storage as well, that's supported. You'd just access those through scripts under the DATA tab.
To check out a production app that's already doing this, I'd point your to Slot Machine by the SeeSharpGuys.
Win Store: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-US/app/slot-machine/7c60012a-00bd-4cae-a402-a9885ec11ea1
WP8: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/slot-machine-mobile/9fa24191-d08d-4073-8098-740975e41946

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