Windows Phone 7 Development links

I just followed a great TechDays Belgium session about Windows Phone 7 and I must say this definitely rocks …. and it is really easy to get started as all the necessary Windows Phone 7 developer tools can be downloaded from http://developer.windowsphone.com. There are basically 2 models for building applications for Windows Phone 7 – either using the XNA model or using the Silverlight model.

If you download the developer tools you will notice that they can be added to an existing Visual Studio 2010 installation or if you don’t have Visual Studio installed it will add Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone. The download also contains the Windows Phone Emulator as well as XNA Game Studio 4.0 – check out the Windows Phone 7 Training Kit on MSDN and the Windows Phone 7 Training Kit direct download.

Some interesting tidbits:

• Currently C# is the only supported programming language
• Windows Phone is cloud-ready – you might for example want to integrate XBox Live
• Windows Phone will only support 2 resolutions – 480x800 and 320x480
• Your windows phone is orientation aware - in Silverlight you will have explicit orientation events which you can use to manipulate the UI in your apps.
• Since the Windows Phone has a built-in accelerometer you will be able to program against it – using a standard API
• Windows Phone 7 supports multi-touch, again a new way to handle input both in XNA as well as Silverlight.
• Navigation uses pages

Related links:

• CTP release of the OData Client Library for Windows Phone 7 series
• Tips for using the OData Client Library for Windows Phone 7
• Charles Petzold’s  ‘Programming Windows Phone 7 Series’ (Book preview chapter) http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/C/8/7C820C6F-C205-4ECF-B9F3-1505DD13F9BF/ProgWinPhonePreview.pdf
• Charlie Kindel’s blog (PM on the Windows Phone team) -http://blogs.msdn.com/ckindel/
• Windows Phone blog -  http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/
• Windows Phone Developer blog - http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/wpdev/

Expect more info to come in the next days ….

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