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This is a community wiki list of Windows Phone 7 resources. Feel free to edit/add/etc.
When posting, please use the friendly format of
[Actual Name of resource with a link]
not
[some long URL with no meaning unless I click on it]
General Information
App hub - central place for windows phone/xbox development tools/tutorials/info
Windows Phone Home
Windows Phone Team blog
Programming Guide
Class Library Reference
Microsoft Patterns & Practices: Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide
Blogs
Den by default: Windows Phone 7
.NET Zone: Windows Phone 7
Shawn Wildermuth: Windows Phone 7
Jeff Blankenburg: 31 Days of Windows Phone
Articles
Building a Windows Phone 7 Puzzle Game
Windows Phone 7 View Model Style Video Player
Perst - a database for Windows Phone 7 Silverlight
Understanding the Windows Phone Application Execution Model, Tombstoning, Launcher and Choosers:
(part1) (part2) (part3)
Performance Tips when creating WP7 apps
Windows Phone 7 Live Tile Schedules – How to execute instant Live Tile updates
Tips to get your Application in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace ASAP
Checking for Network connectivity in Windows Phone 7 SDK
Windows Phone 7.1: a Quick Start
A Simple Multi-Page Windows Phone 7 Phonegap Example
Books
Programming Windows Phone 7
Professional Windows Phone 7 Application Development
Pro Windows Phone 7 Development
Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development
Learning Windows Phone Programming
Windows Phone 7 Game Development
Windows Phone 7 Application Development
101 Windows Phone 7 Apps, Volume I: Developing Apps 1-50
101 Windows Phone 7 Apps, Volume II: Developing Apps 51-101 (Fall 2011)
Podcasts
Charlie Kindel on Windows Phone 7
Daniel Egan talks Windows Phone 7 Live at Launch
Windows Phone 7 Series - The Developer Experience with Charlie Kindel
Charles Petzold on Windows Phone 7 Series
Videos
Windows Phone 7 Jump Start sessions
Colin Melia on Windows Phone 7
Channel9 Content for WIndows Phone
Developer Tools
8 Must-Have Tools for Windows Phone 7 Development
Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW
EQATEC Profiler for Windows Phone 7
BugSense, bug tracking for Windows Phone 7
Frameworks
OpenNETCF.IoC Framework
Autofac for WP7
Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework
MVVM Light Toolkit
Columbus: Windows Phone 7 MVC framework
Windows Phone MVP
Caliburn.Micro - MVVM framework strongly based on conventions
Windows Phone 7 Jumpstart Training
Training (Video and PDF) includes:
An Introduction to the Windows Phone Platform
Game Building on the Windows Phone Platform
Advanced Windows Phone Development
Selling Your Windows Phone Solutions & Wrap Up
The .NET REST client RestSharp supports Windows Phone 7. It really simplifies using web services and deserializing the response.
Windows Phone Dev Podcast!!! Don't forget that one! They let you know the latest about the Windows Phone AND they talk to developers (like the guy who made Evernote) about how they made their apps.
I would also add: 30+ Excellent Windows Phone Development Tutorials
Here is some information about framework that I had recently published: http://columbus.codeplex.com/
Columbus is MVC framework designed specifically for the Windows Phone 7 platform and supports:
Strongly typed navigation with history
View Models that can survive tombstoning
Asynchronous and cancelable controller actions with execution progress
Commands (CAB style)
Multiple navigation frames
Features to help applications to be complaint with 'Windows Phone 7 Application Certification Requirements'
Easy integration with IoC containers available on the Windows Phone 7 platform (source code solution contains samples demonstrating how to use Columbus with Autofac and Ninject).
Simplified and testable usage of Choosers
Here is another good intro into phone specific features of silverlight:
Andrea Boschin on WP7
Plurasight
http://www.pluralsight-training.net/microsoft/
this has excellent in depth video tutorials to get you started.
There are few excellent tutorial sets for beginners.
Video series from Bob Tabor for absolute beginners These videos are excellent and easy to follow.
Once you have started and need help on specific topics consider searching on GeekChamp
When you are in a position to publish apps and fine tune things then the blog series by Jeff Blankenburg is quite useful.
Related
I was reading about Windows Phone 8.1 Development, because I already work with Windows Phone 8 and I intend to start working with the new OS version.
Then I downloaded the Visual Studio for Windows with update 4, opened one project of mine (target to WP8) and clicked to "upgrade to 8.1".
I saw that my solution changed the name to "Windows Phone SilverLight 8.1".
Then I tried to create a new project targeting Windows Phone 8.1, and I saw the following options under Visual C# tree (as shows the image):
Universal Apps
Windows Apps
Windows Phones Apps
As my goal is to develop for phone devices with Windows Phone 8.1, I chose "Windows Phone Apps". But I saw that this project is kind different from the other (the one that I upgraded from WP8). It appears "Windows Phone 8.1" on the solution instead of "Windows Phone SilverLight 8.1". And codes are also very different.
So, I made a research about it, to understand the difference between "Windows Phone SilverLight 8.1" and "Windows Phone 8.1", read some posts like this:
Difference between Windows Phone Silverlight 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 development
What is the difference between Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight
In windows phone 8.1 what is the differance between Windows phone project and silverlight project?
but I couldn't find anything that made me understand.
At some point, I found an answer saying that "Windows Phone 8.1" is for Universal Apps... but I disagree, if I wanted to create an Universal App, I would choose the "Universal App" instead of "Windows Phone Apps".
Does anyone knows exactly the difference between this two projects?
The main difference is that Windows Phone 8.1 Store Apps strictly use WinRT APIs which are not available under Silverlight.
Before you read on, this is the short version:
Windows Phone 8.1 Store App code runs on all Windows Phone 8.1+ and Windows 8+ machines, since it uses the unified WinRT API.
Windows Phone Silverlight App code runs on all Windows Phones 7+ but not on all Windows 8 machines (ARM machines do not support all features). That's why Windows Store apps are using different APIs (WinRT). You might want to check out this link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/jj681690%28v=vs.105%29.aspx
Windows Phones were using Silverlight apps only up to version 8 while apps for Windows 8 (an up) offered the WinRT API as well - you may have noticed the Windows 8 RT versions for ARM CPUs..
So - to stop the endless parallelism of Silverlight and WinRT Microsoft decided to unify the development process. Starting from Windows Phone 8.1, Windows Phone also runs WinRT (rebranded as Windows Runtime, I think) apps.
The main advantage is that you can now easily port Windows Phone 8.1 code to a Windows 8.1 app and vice versa, since both are using the same APIs. Accessing files, storage, networking.. it's all the same across Windows Phone and for Windows Store Apps.
This is where Universal Apps come into play. Instead of porting your code later by creating a new project you can now easily create a universal project that contains shared code both for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1.
However, the downside is that your app won't run on Windows Phones < 8.1.
The difference is in the framework the app will use.
Silverlight is a plugin like Flash, so if you develop an app that use it, you have to use his library/syntax. It is an old way to develop web and phone applications.
Universal is the new framework that Microsoft develop for help developers to create apps that run both on Windows Phone or Windows Store.
So, what you find in internet is correct: Phone App is for Universal framework.
The voices that VS offers mean:
- Universal App: for any device (Phone/Tablet/PC)
- Phone App: only for Phone (pay attention! Can use any library developed for Universal App since Universal App can run on Phone)
- Windows App: only for Tablet/PC (no phone). You can use Universal App library like Phone App can do
I hope this could help
Silver Light project does have service reference facility while in window phone it is removed so you can use either azure provided services or rest services while developing for windows phone
I have just installed Windows 8.1 and then installed Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition.
I tried to create a Windows Phone app and found out that there are two ways of creating it (in fact 3 if you count Universal Apps if I am not wrong)
Windows Phone
Windows Phone Silverlight
Can someone please tell me what exactly is the difference between these two? I read a couple of articles but still don't understand and this whole thing is very confusing.
When I tried to create a Windows Phone Silverlight project then it asked me whether I want to target 8.0 or 8.1.
When I tried to create Windows Phone project then it asked me to get a Developer license and didn't ask about version 8.0 or 8.1.
What shall I chose if my aim is to create an application for mobile devices (tablet/phones) that will run on maximum devices running Windows Phone 8 version?
Windows Phone 8 Silverlight is the older UI on Windows Phone 8. WinRT XAML is used for Windows Store Apps(these are Universal Apps). Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight is a bit different as explained here.
Windows Phone Silverlight, although older, is better in some ways. If your aim is to develop an app that is targeted only for phones and that doesn't have any use getting ported to Win8/RT, go with Silverlight. Background Audio is a mess in WinRT. Speech Recognition with Cortana is worse.
The controls of WinRT XAML are buggy. For example, there is a clear performance degradation of MapControl in WinRT XAML, whereas, in Silverlight, this is smoother.
On the other hand, Windows Store Apps have .NET Native, which converts C# to native C++ code, resulting in performance gains.
For a beginner, I would advise starting with Windows Phone 8 Silverlight apps.
Windows Phone Silverlight is the "old" platform that WP8.0 apps are built on. It asked you to target 8.0 or 8.1 because WP8.1 has a hybrid mode that lets you build WP8.1 apps but still have access to the Sliverlight API if you had a whole lot of legacy code you didn't want to port over just yet.
Windows Phone is the (mostly) universal platform for WP8.1 that is based on Windows Runtime.
I start developing Windows Phone 8 apps recently. I'm trying to do an app for a local radio. They use Shoutcast for internet broadcasting.
But I see that WP doesn't have native shoutcast support. So I searched for implementation for Shoutcast. I found http://shoutcastmss.codeplex.com/ and start working on it.
I succeeded to play shoutcast but I want to do a live tile that shows current song. But due to restrictions on Windows Phone 8, I need to upgrade my project to Windows Phone 8.1 to update live tiles more often.
My project is based on Windows Phone Silverlight 8.0. Thanks(!) to Microsoft, BackgroundAudioPlayer class is no more available for Windows Phone Silverlight 8.1.
So,
Is there a way to use BackgroundAudioPlayer in Windows Phone Silverlight 8.1?
Or
If I have to make it a Windows Phone 8.1 Runtime App, How can I do that?
Or
Can I keep it as a Windows Phone Silverlight 8.0 app, but update the live tile every minute? (User will have WP 8.1)
Thanks,
I don't think it'll work for WP Silverlight 8.1. As for working with BackgroundAudioPlayer is a limitation in Windows Phone Silverlight 8.1. Therefore you will have to write an app that targets WP8.0 Silverlight or WP8.1 WinRt app.
You could refer here for more:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/c9275491-cfff-4078-bc6d-6debe5372790/backgroundaudioplayer-is-not-working-after-upgrading-windows-phone-8-apps-to-windows-phone?forum=wpdevelop
Hope it helps!
Im searching for a good resource/list of all features I have at my disposal as a a WP7-developer such as music, sound, accelerometer, gps, flashlight, vibrator etc etc. What can I do with the phone? What can I use? Preferable with simple code-examples. Both when it comes to XNA and Silverlight.
The Windows Phone Development on the MSDN Library is a great resource for all of the available APIs and with code samples for most of it.
You might also be interested in the following resources:
Charles Petzold: Programming Windows Phone 7
Rob Miles: Windows Phone Programming in C#
UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7
Nick Randolph and Christoper Fairburn: Professional Windows Phone 7 Application Development: Building Applications and Games Using Visual Studio, Silverlight, and XNA
As it relates to XNA, you can see all of the educational catalog content that relates to the windows phone platform on the AppHub site at this URL:
http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/?contenttype=0&devarea=0&platform=54&sort=1
Try "Programming with Windows Phone 7" by Charles Petzold:
http://www.charlespetzold.com/phone/
It is a free online book that describes the features of WIndows Phne 7 in depth (including the phones hardware capabilities), and how to program in Silverlght and XNA.
Jeff covers alot of features in 31 days of WP7:
http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/post/31-Days-of-Windows-Phone-7.aspx
Is Silverlight for Mobile now available as of today, April 21, 2010?
Is it supported in Windows Mobile 6 phones? I read that it will only be supported in Windows 7 Phones
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/can-silverlight-save-windows-mobile-from-plummeting-sales.ars
The Developer Tools can be downloaded here, but there aren't any Windows Phone 7 devices released yet.
Is Silverlight for Mobile now available?
It is still in Community Technical Preview for Windows Phone 7 (as of 21 April 2010) and it is not compatible with Visual Studio 2010 RTM Version. The emulator is supposed to be pretty good so we can develop against it.
Is it supported in Windows Mobile 6 phones?
It is not available for WM6 (yet). I am not sure with their plan.
from Wikipedia:
The first Community Technology Preview (CTP) for Windows Mobile 6 was
expected in the 2nd Quarter of 2008,
but it still not officially announced.
Microsoft has stopped focusing on
bringing Silverlight to Windows Mobile
6.x and is planning to include it in Windows Mobile 7.[55]
Last month I read this blog-article about an "open source clone" of silverlight coming to Iphone. I'm very curious about this
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/03/14/novell-to-bring-open-source-silverlight-clone-to-iphone/