Question

I was wondering if it is possible to develop a text messaging kind of application similar to WhatsApp, but for between WP7 devices? What difficulty programming skill level am I looking at and what would be required to develop such an app? Thanks!

Answer 1

In general I don’t think it will be really difficult to build an app like WhatsApp. (Although I only heard about the funcationality) So I will give you the information I think you should have at a minimum.

In the first place you need your WP7 app, which I think should have push notifications to notify users about new messages. (Note: push notifications work in batches, so there will be no instant delivery notification to the end user.) You should have a login system in your WP7 app, which makes users uniquely identifiable.

Somewhere you should have a central datastore where you can store users, messages, relations between messages (replies, forwards, etc.) (Note: If your app becomes as big as WhatsApp you should have a really good scalable datastore.).

I would use WCF to communicate between your datastore and the WP7 app. Probably I have overseen something right now, but this will give you a start for defining your applications architecture.

UPDATE 12:54

As i saw your comment about where to start I searched for some documentation:

There is a free e-book from Charles Petzold which covers alot:
http://www.charlespetzold.com/phone/

Also there are a lot of code samples and documentation on MSDN:
Main overview of WP7 development:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff402535(v=vs.92).aspx

WP7 code samples:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431744(v=vs.92).aspx