Make TouchDevelop apps and put them in Windows Phone Marketplace

One of the many neat things that I saw at SIGCSE last week was TouchDevelop. This lets you write Windows Phone programs on your Windows Phone. The programming language and the user interface have been carefully crafted to work on a small handheld platform. If you have done a bit of programming already you should have no problem creating simple scripts to do all manner of interesting things. There’s even a simple sprite engine with physics support for game creation. There’s a free book about it that you can download.

It’s early days yet, but the developers of the environment have just taken a massive step towards making the platform into a genuinely useful place to create things. They’ve made it possible to publish your TouchDevelop scripts in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Up until now you could spread your scripts around to other phone owners, but only via the TouchDevelop phone application. Now you can distribute your TouchDevelop applications and games to the entire Windows Phone owning world. This means you could get on a bus with nothing but your Windows Phone and a good idea. And then get off the bus three hours later with a completed application which is ready for sale. Amazing stuff.

Find out more here.