Script your phone! Write code for your phone, on your phone! TouchDevelop is a radically new software development environment on the Windows Phone, bringing the excitement of the first programmable personal computers to the phone.
touchdevelop.com
Go to touchdevelop.com to browse through all scripts published by users like you.
- Read about the TouchDevelop programming environment
- Learn programming with TouchDevelop
- Teach with TouchDevelop, use our University phone loan program
 |
TouchDevelop@UW Hackathon On May 4–5, 2012, Microsoft Research Connections held a 24-hour “TouchDevelop@UW Hackathon” at the University of Washington, inviting students to try their hand at TouchDevelop programming. TouchDevelop is a novel application development environment from Microsoft Research that enables users to code right on their smartphones, with no need for a separate PC. |
|
|
TouchDevelop Excites Students Ninety eighth-grade students at Mill Creek Middle School in Kent, Washington, learned how to write smartphone programs with TouchDevelop, a Microsoft Research programming environment that enables users to create and test programs on Windows Phone. Most of the students had no prior experience with programming, but after tinkering with TouchDevelop for an hour, students came up with a variety of innovative and fun programs that they proudly demonstrated to their peers. This Microsoft Research-sponsored event was in support of Computer Science Education Week 2011 (December 4–11). This annual event recognizes the critical role of computing in today’s society and the imperative to bolster computer science education at all levels in the United States. |
the idea behind TouchDevelop
The way in which we interact with computing devices is changing: instead of keyboards, advanced touchscreens become more common; mobile devices are often equipped with more sensors, such as location information and acceleration, and are always connected to the cloud.
TouchDevelop is a new programming environment and language built around this new reality. Its typed, structured programming language is built around the idea of only using a touchscreen as the input device to author code. It has built-in primitives which make it easy to access the rich sensor data available on a mobile device. In our vision, the state of the program is automatically distributed between mobile clients and the cloud, with automatic synchronization of data and execution between clients and cloud, liberating the programmer from worrying (or even having to know) about the details.
current version: TouchDevelop v2.7
The latest version enables sharing of scripts in the cloud, "pin to start" of scripts to the main phone start screen, a discussion forum, and much more…
- Sebastian Burckhardt, Manuel Fahndrich, Daan Leijen, and Benjamin P. Wood, Cloud Types for Eventual Consistency, in Proceedings of the 26th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP), Springer, 15 June 2012
- Sebastian Burckhardt, Manuel Fahndrich, Daan Leijen, and Mooly Sagiv, Eventually Consistent Transactions (full version), no. MSR-TR-2011-117, October 2011
- Marat Akhin, Nikolai Tillmann, Manuel Fahndrich, Jonathan de Halleux, and Michal Moskal, Code Similarity in TouchDevelop: Harnessing Clones, no. MSR-TR-2011-103, 9 September 2011
- Xusheng Xiao, Nikolai Tillmann, Manuel Fahndrich, Peli de Halleux, and Michal Moskal, Transparent Privacy Control via Static Information Flow Analysis, no. MSR-TR-2011-93, 2 August 2011
- Nikolai Tillmann, Michal Moskal, Jonathan de Halleux, and Manuel Fahndrich, TouchDevelop - Programming Cloud-Connected Mobile Devices via Touchscreen, no. MSR-TR-2011-49, 15 April 2011
- Nikolai Tillmann, Michal Moskal, Jonathan de Halleux, and Manuel Fahndrich, TouchDevelop: programming cloud-connected mobile devices via touchscreen, in Proceedings of the 10th SIGPLAN symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming and software, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2011
You might also like:
Meet the people behind TouchDevelop:
And our (former) interns:
Interested in an internship with the TouchDevelop team? Apply for an internship at Microsoft Research, and also send us an email with your resume.
Do you want to use TouchDevelop in school, as a student or as a teacher? Send us an email.
Associated research groups:
