Michael Crump walks us through using Preemptive Solutions&#39; Dotfuscator to add runtime analytics to WP7 apps (See what features your users are really using in your apps)

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Michael Crump walks us through using Preemptive Solutions' Dotfuscator to add runtime analytics to WP7 apps (See what features your users are really using in your apps)

CodeProject - Adding Analytics to your Windows Phone 7 App with Preemptive Solutions

"I have always been interested in learning which features of my application users are using as well as if they are using it. I have done this with other applications by using my own “home-grown” version of web services, etc. Since I have been working a lot with Windows Phone 7 lately, I decided to learn how to do this and share with the community. Before you get started you will be pleased to know that you won’t have to spend any money *at least until 2012* to do this with your existing phone apps.

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Overall I’m very impressed with the services that Preemptive Solution provided. From everything that I gathered this service was going to be free until January 2012. If you decide not to pay then you won’t have to resubmit your application. It will still work, you just won’t have any access to the data it provides.

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I love the idea of this. Getting hard data on what features your users are using and how often, without bugging them wit surveys, emails, questionnaires, etc, could be invaluable. I SO want to include this capability in my future apps at work and in my future personal projects (via opt-in there of course) too.

And think about it. Add this to your WP7 app and you'll see what the Marketplace testers are doing in your app before its released... :P