Here I've been investigating Android because it seemed like the most promising smartphone development platform when Microsoft goes and announces Windows Phone 7, which has the potential to change everything.
It's no secret that the Windows Mobile platform has languished for years, limping along in anemic fashion behind better, stronger contenders like the iPhone and any number of Android-based devices. From a Windows developer perspective and as someone who recognizes that smartphones are inexorably tied to our future as users and developers, I've wanted to dive into smartphone development for a while now. The iPhone somehow never appealed to me, though. Perhaps it's the almost foreign toolset. So I started looking at Android. At least you can write Android apps on Windows using tools and a language that are somewhat similar to Visual Studio and .NET.
Needless to say, my focus has shifted since the announcement of the Windows Phone 7 platform and CTP release of the development tools.
In this post I wanted to start with the very basics: what you need to download and install to get started writing Windows Phone apps. Given the CTP nature of things, and the fact that even Visual Studio as I write this is still in beta, there are quite a few pieces you need to assemble.
Windows Phone 7 apps are written in .NET using Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, Silverlight 4, and (optionally) Expression Blend. Given that Silverlight for Symbian is already in the works, we have a great opportunity here to leverage our existing Silverlight skills on not one but two mobile platforms. It just doesn't get any better than that.
As they stand now, here are the myriad downloads as they pertain to the tools you'll need.
Windows Phone
Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP
Includes:
- Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP
- Windows Phone Emulator CTP
- Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP
- XNA 4.0 Game Studio CTP
Silverlight 4
1. Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010
The bare minimum for Silverlight or Silverlight for Windows Phone development.
Includes:
2. Silverlight 4 Toolkit
Not sure you need this for Windows Phone development per se, but if you're doing anything with Silverlight you'll want it anyway.
Expression Blend
I'm no Blend expert, but it's supposed to come in handy when developing Windows Phone apps.
Here are the downloads.
1. Expression Blend 4 Beta
2. Microsoft Expression Blend Add-in Preview for Windows Phone
3. Microsoft Expression Blend Software Development Kit (SDK) Preview for Windows Phone
Conclusion
Once everything is installed you're ready to go:
Rather than write up my own tutorial I will instead refer you to Pete Brown's Building your first Silverlight for Windows Phone Application, which does a nice job of walking you through creating your first project and adding some basic enhancements, and Scott Guthrie's Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight, which is quite good as well (note that the url Scott provides to retrieve tweets is incorrect and should be "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=").
There's still a lot to learn, but given that the toolset and choice of languages are familiar to most of us, we should have an easier time of it.
Resources
On the Web
Official Developer Guides
Books
Tutorials
On Twitter
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