Welcome to a new mobile platform from Microsoft called Windows Phone 7.
The purpose of this article is to show you just how easy and approachable Windows Phone 7 is from a developer’s perspective.
Windows Phone 7 Development
Hundreds of thousands of developers have downloaded the RTW (Released To the Web) build of the Windows Phone Developer Tools made available at http://developer.windowsphone.com on Sep 16th 2010. These free (!) tools let you create applications and games that will run on a variety of Windows Phone 7 devices expected to make their debut in time for this year’s festive season in multiple markets around the globe. Those devices can also be used to directly access Microsoft’s online marketplaces for applications, games, music, videos & movies (subject to region).
The new Windows Phone devices – phones for consumers who also take their phones to work – is built on a very well defined target platform across all manufacturers’ devices in terms of common and minimum hardware characteristics as well as a fresh and consistent user experience. If there’s an update to the OS, Microsoft will make updates directly available to phone users. While it may be a V1 product in terms of its revised marketing and revamped application layer, the underlying platform, technologies and tools have a well-established pedigree familiar to an incredibly large developer pool with a huge leg up on the learning curve when developing for the platform.
We can’t have a new magazine without one of those self-scoring self-help questionnaires… If you are already a .NET developer, give yourself 25 percentage points. Built any Silverlight or WPF applications? Give yourself another 25. Ever developed with WCF or other web-based services? That’s a final 25% for you. You could already be 75% of the way to knowing how to develop for this platform.
Whether you have the existing skillset and tools in-hand yet or not, this article can help take you on a rapid journey up that 75% and delve a little into what’s new.
You will not have me at ‘Hello, World!’
For the typical getting started application, we’d be over in just a couple of sentences and a single screenshot, and I really don’t expect anyone to be convinced by that.
We need an application, that in less than an hour, is straightforward to build, is one where we can (re-)introduce concepts and code ideas you can leverage, and that demonstrates important capabilities or topics such as:
- The tools
- Silverlight
- Controls
- Layout
- Controls
- MVVM
- Resources
- Themes
- Data binding
- Items Controls
- Data Templates
- Asynchronous web requests
- LINQ to XML
- Orientation
Say hello to the Hello Windows Phone 7 Twitter application where we can see what people are saying about Windows Phone 7 development.
Recent Comments