Getting your WP7 Desktop integration out of park with PAARC, the Phone as a Remote Control library

An article by Sayron5 No Comments

You have your Windows app. You have your Windows Phone 7. Wouldn't it be cool if you could control your Windows app from your phone? Turning your phone into a very powerful, configurable and flexible controller? Turning it into a remote control for your Windows app? But how would you write that? How would you connect the phone to the app? Send commands and status back a forth?

That's the thing. You don't have to write it! Peter Kuhn (aka Mister Goodcat) has already written it for you and even open sourced the source too!

Announcing: Phone as a Remote Control

Shortly after I got my Windows Phone I had the idea of creating an app that lets me remotely control my desktop computer. The reason for that was that lazy me needed to use a clumsy and error-prone full-size wireless keyboard and mouse when I wanted to surf the web from my couch, using the small media PC connected to my TV set. Wouldn't it be nicer to use the much more handy mobile phone as input device? Unfortunately the RTM version of Windows Phone was missing some networking features for that – using web services or http wasn't what I was looking for. The Mango release changed that, because TCP/UDP socket support was added to the platform.

After I started working on the app I quickly realized that it would be really cool to not just have this feature for my own purposes, but to create a generic library which could be integrated into your own applications, both on the phone and desktop side. That was the moment when I decided to create PAARC ("Phone as a Remote Control") – sorry for the boring name, I couldn't come up with something better and more exciting .

PAARC has the following features:

• Uses TCP and UDP sockets for maximum performance and responsiveness (watch the demo video to see for yourself), but handles all the networking and threading stuff for you behind the scenes.
• Requires minimum technical knowledge from your end-users by e.g. using a server discovery mechanism – no cryptic networking terms to handle, "one-click" connect feature.
• Supports raw (multi-)touch input, the built-in phone gestures like taps, flicks, pinching and dragging, acquisition of all sensor data (accelerometer, compass, gyroscope, combined motion) and text input.
• Comes with a reference WP7 client with support for tombstoning/deactivation and all supported data types, so you don't have to create a separate app to get started (but you can do that, of course, or integrate the client-side library into your already existing phone app).
• Allows full configuration and control from the host application (your .NET desktop app).
• Has built-in remote tracing features to track down problems.
• Comes with a few demo applications you can learn from and is fully documented.

See more details on WP7 Desktop integration with PAARC.