Looking for a Windows App Developer

[drfish]

As some of you may know I am/my company is one of the rare ones that adopted WP7 when it first came out and recently switched over to WP8 and a fleet of Lumia 920s. The entire time I've pushed back as sales guy after sales guy begged for an iPad "for work" - but we're now on the cusp of rolling out Win8 tablets to a number of users (not because I think they will be super useful but because I can't stall much longer) and I'm thinking the Asus VivoTab Smart will fit the bill nicely as a compromise of cost, form factor, performance, battery life and general capability. The exact hardware choice isn't critical though and besides, I already know what people are going to say, "its too hard to use our product configurator with a tablet" and indeed I have been saying that myself for a long time - its possible but its not pleasant.

So, I have been given the preliminary OK to start working towards a complete replacement for our ~6 year old Java/web based half out of the box half home grown configurator/quote management tool and ideally its form and function would mimic a native Win8/WP8 app and Metro Modern UI style as close as possible (because everyone is actually really happy with their phones).

What do you think? I'm not really concerned about going "all in" with MS since we've already got most of the hardware and software to back it up. I mostly need help finding a developer to go into more details with and ultimately quote the job... Initial Google results tell me everything I need to know to become a Windows App Store developer but I'm not seeing a lot of resumes...

What community/company am I missing? Should I be posting this on the xda-developers forum? Has anyone on TR tackled a Win8 app? Know anyone that has?

[lonleyppl]

SSK recently posted a Windows App that could be used for TR.

After looking at the toolkit a little bit, you might not want to look for someone who lists Windows App Development on their resume, but instead look for someone who's familiar with C# (or Java, or something OOP) and has experience developing GUIs and such.

[drfish]

Fair enough. The job should be pretty straight forward, we really just need to duplicate/optimize the existing feature set so I can see most of the effort going into the GUI.

[TREE]

I've got experience in programming in WindowsRT / Windows 8 / Windows Phone 8 tools and have dabbled a little in UI programming to create samples. I've also got experience in programming Android, C and C++ applications. What is it that you want to know about programming on Windows 8?

[drfish]

Its not so much that I need to know about it. I am looking for a developer/company to take a crack at building an app for us. I did a chunk of the work on the last configurator but it was pretty basic programming. The "out of the box" part of the existing solution meant that all the interface work was drag and drop - simple enough to build but not 2013 touch oriented. My existing contacts for this sort of work don't have the chops to make it happen in Win8/WP8 so I'm looking to make new ones. I would prefer a company (for support and redundancy reasons) but would work with the right individual. I considered just looking at the developer names of remotely similar existing apps - or ones that have a GUI I like and contacting them to see if they would do a contract job but wanted to get advice here first.

[TREE]

Ah okay, well in that case I can direct you to the company that I work for - if you would like? We develop mobile applications, tools and websites for both private businesses and the public sector (UK government).

From what you've described above it sounds more than feasible that we could take on that project.