The IMSA Mobile Apps project is currently in flight and we are actively working on building this cross platform/cross OS solution. This article is the first in a series of blogs discussing the details of the project, and we’ll be actively trying to catch up to the current day as we are busy building towards the Laguna Seca race.

Back in the first week of December 2014 we flew out to Florida to visit the IMSA team with Microsoft in Daytona Beach. Microsoft was hosting an Architecture Design Session, or ADS for short, to flesh out features of the solution. It became quickly apparent that the solution was layered and complex. Many features discussed have become part of longer product roadmap as IMSA is committed to providing the best experience possible to their fans. Also, it should be noted as in all ideation sessions, some ideas discussed are put deep down in the feature backlog.

I am certain that some would ask why IMSA involved Microsoft. This is a mobile app – what does Microsoft know about building mobile apps across iOS and Android? Well, it turns out quite a lot. From past projects, we already knew the tooling we get with Visual Studio and Xamarin allows us to build amazing mobile apps across all platforms and OS’s. The other side of the coin is the plumbing we get to integrate into cloud infrastructure. This app needed to scale across the huge IMSA fan base during live events. From past projects we knew how effective we could be building scalable mobile apps with Azure. So to IMSA and to us, involving Microsoft made perfect sense.

In the ADS, some of the interesting features starting popping up:

The app would need to change shape depending on whether or not a race is live or not. We thought treating the app almost like the NFL Now app would be interesting. There could be something interesting always to watch on our app, regardless if an event is live or not.

IMSA radio is a live audio stream. The app would need to deliver this feed just like other integrated audio content on your device. So turning on IMSA radio, putting your headphones on, and then your device in your pocket should be as natural as playing music.

Using the device’s GPS, if the race fan is at the event the app should respond differently than if the person were elsewhere. When you are at an event, what you are interested in is different than when you are not.

Telemetry information from the cars. It would be just awesome to watch your favorite car at the event or at home and see all the g-forces they are pulling when they are flying around the corners.

IMSA services to content and structured information are not scalability to a mobile play. A cloud infrastructure would need to be placed in front of the IMSA services so content could be cached and served more quickly.

After the ADS we went home and decomposed all the features while looking at the schedule. We needed to pick a race event to target deployment. We had a lot of homework to determine our approach. In this next blog we will be discussing how we were planning on maximizing code re-use across all platforms and OS’s.