As one of the world’s first Windows Phone 8 applications, Nfc Interactor is now available for download in the Windows Phone Store.

This is an incredibly useful tool for developers, as it allows you to experiment with NFC on your phone, without the need to write your own code right away.

Nfc Tool for Developers

Nfc Interactor can read and parse NFC tag contents. Even better is that you can use it to easily create and write your own tags. This allows you to for example test how your WP8 app reacts to LaunchApp tags, or if it works to launch your app through your own custom URI scheme, probably even with parameters that are written to the tag. More details in my article: How to Launch Apps via Proximity APIs (NFC).

Nfc Interactor also supports peer-to-peer communication for sending messages to another device (using the standardized SNEP protocol). As you can define any kind of NDEF message in the editor, you can test how the other phone will react to incoming messages; or – in case your app is listening to incoming proximity messages – you can test how your app will react; both to planned messages, as well as if your app stays stable if it receives unexpected messages via NFC.

Open Source Nfc Code for Developers

In some scenarios, you will need to have more control over the actual NFC message contents than the Windows Proximity APIs will provide to you. Reading, understanding and implementing the complex NDEF message specifications of the NFC Forum will cost you many hours or even days of precious work time.

To make your life easier and get your new NFC apps quicker to the market, I’ve released the heart of Nfc Interactor as an open source component: the NDEF Library for Proximity APIs.

The library is collection of C# classes that works both for Windows 8 as well as for Windows Phone 8 apps. You can use it to create NDEF messages containing one or more NDEF records, as well as for reading and parsing messages you got from peers or a tag.

Using the library will for example enable you to write a cross-platform LaunchApp tag, which contains multiple records: a Windows LaunchApp record for Windows (Phone) 8, a cutom record type (external RTD) for Symbian, plus an Android Application Record for Google Android. I’ve published more details about how to get this to work at the Microsoft TechNet Wiki.

Getting Started

With NFC now being an important part of both Windows Phone 8 as well as Windows 8, you can write exciting new apps, as well as integrate NFC into your existing apps to expand your customer base or to add unique new features.

The article How to Acquire and Publish Content from / to NFC Tags and Proximity Peers contains a short and concise overview of the Proximity APIs and how to put them into use.