If you have Visual Studio you ought to be able to just F5 and do testing even without the Internet, although obviously you won't be able to connect to your company's source depot.

Some stuff to look out for:

* You'll need to manually sync if you're going to be offline for a while. This gets more difficult the more out of sync your code gets.

* Hopefully your company has the policy that all code in SVN must build, otherwise you will have problems if someone else on your team broke your code by submitting buggy stuff to the depot.

* You might need to ask your IT admin whether viewing source code on a train potentially opposite one of your competitors is allowed.

* You need to make sure that your laptop has Bitlocker installed, otherwise if you lose your laptop, you lose your company's secret source code.

Apart from that it should just work. There is of course the obvious problem that laptops are a little clunky for use on a bus; so you might prefer using either a very small laptop or a tablet instead.

You can't timestamp your code if you don't have an Internet connection.

Delicate adjustment of the placing of controls on forms can be difficult when you're jiggling around.

Fellow passengers/scenery/announcements can be distracting.

The Windows Phone development I want to do is for myself, only. I do work as a professional software engineer, but where I work there's no chance of doing any mobile development for the foreseeable future. However, I want to get into this on my own, I have some ideas for apps I want to get into the Marketplace. i.e.: this is all on my initiative. So syncing with others isn't an issue. Source control is incumbent upon me.

14 hours ago, magicalclick wrote

Typical near sight, sore neck, dizziness. That's all I care about.

Technically, if you want to use the WP8 emulator on Windows 8, you need to make sure the laptop you use supports SLAT (Second Level Address Translation). If not, it won't run the emulator and you would need to either use an external physical phone, or restrict your testing to the WP7 emulator which doesn't require SLAT.

The WP app I'm working on requires a lot of DSP, so one thing I've done is share the same DSP *.cs files between two projects, one that targets WP8, the other that targets a simple WinForms app. This way I can work on my DSP algorithms without requiring either an emulator or a physical WP device. This allows me to use the full laptop/desktop screen to display detailed debugging graphs etc. It also allows me to use my custom made Debugger Visualizers that don't work for WP development at all (I really wish MS would fix this). For instance I have one visualizer that can take a buffer of floats or doubles and display the audio waveform in a zoomable/scrollable popup window. But this approach is probably only possible for a small amount of app types where you can separate out the internal functionality into an external app. A good argument for MVVM.

According to this timeline, Microsoft has been unable to in over 10+ years fix a bug affecting this sort of scenario:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/mswish/ut-rtc.html

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2687252

The bug is that the computers clock should be set to a known reference time like UTC that does not observe DST, yet Windows is incapable of properly handling this scenario because Microsoft has made the assumption that normal users go to BIOS and manually set the RTC to local time. I would say that is a correct assumption, but only in cases where the users computer is in a fixed location.

How many years does it take for Microsoft engineers to fix a bug? Well 10+ years and counting we can say that for sure.

I don't do it deliberately, but by the time I realise what I'm doing I'm often too interested to stop...

(I've seen some really interesting confidential stuff on people laptops on trains before, confidential court records and the like. They really ought to take better precautions - those screen covers you can get that reduce viewing angle can help but not working on confidential documents in public places is a far more robust solution! )