December 15, 2010

Developing your first Windows Phone 7 Application

Here, I am going to outline the steps to get your first windows phone application going to Marketplace.

  • You will need to create a developer account from http://create.msdn.com/en-US/ (it costs 99$). It may take a few days to get identity verification and everything approved.
  • Download the Windows Phone 7 application development kit from here. This toolkit contains (all the software you need to develop Windows Phone 7 application),
    • Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
    • Windows Phone Emulator Resources
    • Silverlight 4 Tools For Visual Studio
    • XNA Game Studio 4.0
    • Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone
  • Some Resources to get started with Programming,
    • Getting started guide here
    • If you have any questions during the development phase, you can ask the questions on the forums here (msdn forums – official one) and here (silverlight.net)
    • Go through this jump start course to get some information about the development skills.
    • Here is short video course for Windows Phone 7 development.
    • Keep an eye on Windows Phone 7 team’s Blog here
    • MSDN also has extensive documentation for Windows Phone 7 here
    • Download the Windows Phone Training kit from here
    • This MSDN link has Common development tasks
    • Charles Petzold has written a book on Windows Phone 7 Programming, which is freely available from here (actually you can get the PDF from here)
    • One more book called “Windows Phone BlueBook” is available for download for free here
  • I am preparing a list on Twitter that you can follow (once I finish adding most of related people) to get up to date with the Windows Phone 7 news.
  • I am also trying to compile list of all the blogs and websites (in the form of RSS feeds list), once finished I will add it here. (If you want access to the current list right now, leave a comment)

 

I will keep updating this blog post to add further steps as I go through them. You should also check this one out as it contains some information that you need to know as a starter.