Yesterday Yalla Apps contacted with me and asked for an interview. The interview was conducted to get more insight on the WP7 developer community and thier opinions about different platforms.

Below are my answers to the questions of Yalla Apps

Yalla Apps: Are you a Developer or Designer or both? What is your experience level?

Ali Özgür : I’m a software developer. I currently work for Istanbul Bilgi University, one of the largest privately held university in Turkey, as the Platforms and Services Team Manager. I got BS degree in Computer Engineering from Istanbul Technical University and also hold an MBA degree from Istanbul Bilgi University. I’m developing software for more than 10 years. I’ve spend most of this time developing on Microsoft platforms with Microsoft developer tools. I’ve started my software development career working on Motorola MCU software. I’ve developed software with C++, Delphi, C# and ASP.NET MVC during my 10 year career. I worked on military, education, media, document management, OCR, workflow, Windows CE and mobile projects. I’ve contributed to some open source projects and in the mean time I maintain my own open source project PragmaSQL.

Yalla Apps: What gets you started on developing for a certain platform? What are all platforms you develop for?

Ali Özgür : Ecosystem of the platform is very important in my opinion. By ecosystem I mean developer tools, platform APIs and SDKs, programming model of the platform, the quality of the hardware running the platform, market share, general profile of the platform users, nice looking appstore There are also some technical parameters I take into consideration. For example providing a unified programming model to developers for different form factors, having strong DRM (Digital Rights Management) to allow just licensed software are some of the technical parameters.

I’m developing software for Windows platform as part of my regular job with Microsoft .NET and other Microsoft technologies. Under PragmaTouch (my side project) we develop primarily for Apple iOS. Weare also evaluating Android and WP7 and have some demo apps. Personally I’ve also developed for Windows CE couple of years ago.

Yalla Apps: Would you consider developing for WP7? What you think is missing in WP7 development platform – what is better in others?

Ali Özgür: We are not just considering actually we are actively evaluating WP7 by writing some little demo apps. I think WP7 has a great development platform. First of all you build software for WP7 with the greatest development IDE in the market, in my opinion, which is Visual Studio. You develop with C#, which is the master piece of primarily Anders Hejlsberg and all other great guys at Microsoft. I really love C# as a programming language and when combined with Visual Studio you have the bare minimums to produce a quality software. WP7 has an emulator not a simulator, the difference is somehow technical but important. As a developer in my opinion others have nothing better than the WP7 development platform. But as a platform for example copy/paste and hardware is better in iOS,

Yalla Apps: Do you think WP7 will play a significant role in mobile OS?

Ali Özgür : Yes, I definitely think that WP7 will play a significant role in mobile. Especially the recent Microsoft-Nokia agreement and the success of the partnership will be very important in determining the place of WP7 in mobile market. Nokia is the biggest mobile manufacturer by quantity and has high market shares in developing countries where demand for new technology is increasing every year. Xbox customers will also play important role during this process since Microsoft has great customer base on this platform.

Yalla Apps: Do you consider learning new technologies for mobile – which ones?

Ali Özgür : Yes, I consider learning new technologies for mobile. HTML5 is the number one in my personal list.