The skills that you learn in this 1st post will help you throughout the rest of the posts on WP7 Development.
So lets get started.
Before start writing code and understanding WP7 development, lets setup the enviorment for the development. The list of tools and the location from where they can be downloaded is listed below:
- Visual Studio – http:// developer.windowsphone.com
- Expression Blend –http:// developer.windowsphone.com
- Zune Software (If you will test your application on a physical device) –http://www.zune.net/en-us/products/software/download/
Now that you have installed the above softwares, lets see what these tools have to offer.
[highlight]Visual Studio 2010 Express[/highlight]
Visual Studio 2010 Express has its enviorment especially designed for developers. So if you are in the development team then this will be your favourite tool for development in sometime. But if you are a part of designer team this will be secondary tool after expression blend.
[highlight]Expression Blend[highlight]
If you are a designer and have not used Expression Blend before you are going to love this tool as this has got lot of drag and drop design options. Also you can easily create animations, styles, templates, vector graphics, sample data without writing any code. But if have already used Expression Blend, then ido not need to brag about it. 🙂
[highlight]Windows Phone Emulator[highlight]
Windows Phone emulator will provide us with Virtual machine that emulates the Windows Phone 7 Operating System and will provide a test enviornment that is almost identical to the runtime of the Windows Phone devices.
[highlight]Also Included in download[highlight]
The following items will also be included in the download:
- Silverlight 4 SDK
- .NET Framework 4
- XNA Game Studio 4
If youhave been in the .Net world then i do not need to say anything about the first two items. But let me tell you that XNA Game Studio framework is an alternate library for building WP7 applications but does not support layout controls and event driven inputs for line of business applications but instead uses input and graphics method useful for more complex games. If you want to learn XNA then follow the link below:
wp7trainingcourse_wp7xna_unit
Below is the list of tutorials on WP7:
- Create a simple navigation application in Windiows Phone 7 ( WP7 ) – https://www.abhishekshukla.com/development/create-simple-navigation-application/