EnergizeIT: From the Client to the Cloud – The Mobile App

I few months ago RedBit was asked by Microsoft to help them create a Windows Phone 6.5 demo application for EnergizeIT: From the Client to the Cloud tour across Canada. 

The purpose of the mobile software was to allow a fictitious insurance company to collect car accident information from a consumer. The consumer would be able to fill in basic information about the accident, take pictures of the incident, get the GPS location including address of the accident and submit this to a backend system where the data can be collected and acted upon.  The goal was to show EnergizeIT attendees how to leverage the Microsoft based platform and tools such as Silverlight, .NET 4.0, Azure and Visual Studio 2010.  The mobile software used .NET Compact Framework 3.5 but I’ll have a future post on porting it to Windows Phone 7.

RedBit’s role was to get the data from the Windows Phone to the backend database.  Our goal was also to make the mobile app look a little nicer than traditional Windows Mobil apps. What we created is a mobile client to have the consumer enter accident information and also created a WCF service to allow consumers to submit the data for the insurance company to act on. 

For location support we created a WCF service to reverse geocode a location to provide a readable address and an image of the location via Bing Maps API.

The user would also be able to see their insurance card and the autos that are insured cars under their policy.

We also included a feature called On The Road that allowed you to search for various services around you. 

By the way, you can download Find My Bru from Windows Phone Marketplace now.

Overall, I think we were able to deliver a pretty good looking functional app on Windows Phone 6.5 (with a lot of effort for the UI).  Thanks to Christian Beauclair and the rest of the Canadian DPE team for giving us the opportunity to build this app for Windows Phone. 

Unfortunately, I won’t be publishing the source to this app but will be following up on blog posts showing some code snippets that I think will be useful to the developer community. 

I’ll also be following up in another blog post on porting this mobile application to Windows Phone 7 and what code we were able to re-use and most importantly, how easy it is to make a good looking app on Windows Phone 7.

If you want more info on the app please feel free to contact us at info[@]redbitdev[dot]com