Windows Phone App: Susaalandets Skole

I recently had my third app for the Windows Phone certified and made available for download (currently only in the US and Danish stores).

The app, named Susaalandets Skole, is a small app displaying information about the schedule for a given class, the canteen menu, contact information, local weather and so forth for our local (public) school. A few screen shots can be found at the “marketing site” for the app.

All information is read from a Windows Azure Database using a web service as data access layer, so nothing is hardcoded (except for the address of the web service).

I have localized the service for Danish and English. I could not get it certified, when I had the Danish texts hardcoded.

The weather information is streamed from the Norwegian weather service YR.NO.

The menu from the canteen is shown for the current month. I have an agent that automatically downloads the new menu and updates the database from the PDF-file. That is, I download the menu and perform the update. We may be living in 2012, but the school is using the notorious SkoleIntra and it does not support any way to interface with an electronic menu.

I currently only know of one student on the school owning a Windows Phone, namely my oldest son. We have worked together on the design and content, and it has been great fun, so it does not really matter if I don’t get hundreds of downloads. We have already come up with a couple of new features, like notifications T minutes before a lesson is about to start, ability to send “I will be late” SMS to the teacher and a couple of others.

I initially wanted to put a map of the school in the app using Bing maps, which would allow you to zoom, tag the different building and so on. Unfortunately the resolution on Bing where I live is to low for this to work.

Should anyone be interested in the code, let me know and I’ll put it on github or similar.