Develop Apps for Win Phone 7

There are a ton of new mobile platforms out there — iPhone, Android, Symbian

and a few more. The first two have really taken off due to the availability of

lots of apps in their respective App Stores. Microsoft's own mobile phone OS —

Windows Mobile — has been stagnating for a while now, even though it had a great

development platform. However, Microsoft has not really given up the race. Its

upcoming Windows Phone 7 platform and the 'Metro' UI based on the Zune HD

interface has been getting mostly rave reviews from whoever has played with the

devices and software till now. Not only does it bring a completely new paradigm

to the interface over the much-used icon based format, it also doubles up as a

great development platform that can be used quite easily.

This article series will delve into the world of Windows Phone 7 (WP7, in

short) development. We'll try to develop a real-world application over the

coming months in this article that will explore all the different new features

that are available in the platform. This part of the series starts off with an

introduction to the platform itself and the setting up of the development

environment.

Creating your first WP7 project in VS2010.

Windows Phone 7 Development Platform



The Windows Phone 7 platform allows developers to create applications in two

different ways:

Using Silverlight: This is the primary way that apps will be developed

for WP7 and consists of the application written in ­Silverlight — Microsoft's

XAML based application development platform. The Silverlight available in WP7 is

a special version built upon the Silverlight 3 with some phone specific

additions made available. The developer will also get access to a large number

of phone SDK calls that will let him perform some common tasks quite easily.

Using XNA: This is meant primarily for developers who are creating

games for the WP7 platform. Not only will it allow more direct access to the

graphics and sound hardware in the phone, it also has the ability to access the

Games Hub (more about this a ­little later) and be able to synchronize the same

game across the phone, PC and Xbox 360. In this series we will be looking only

at the Silverlight apps development for the phone.

The initial look in of a WP7 project.

Development Tools



Developing for WP7 is quite easy. The tools are currently in Beta state and
freely available. The good thing is that even when the final release is done, it

will also be made available completely for free. So you can start coding in the

beta ­release secure in the knowledge that when the RTM hits, you can simply

upgrade the install bits and it will start working. You can get the tools from

http:// developer.windowsphone.com/. So what all does this have? Here's a list

of what you get when you install the tools:

Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone: A special version of

VS2010 for WP7 development

The WP7 emulator launching your first app.

Expression Blend for Windows Phone: Another special version of Blend

for WP7 UI designing

Windows Phone 7 Emulator: This is a full working image of an unlocked

WP7 device that you can use to test and debug your apps till you get a real

device

XNA Studio for Windows Phone: This is the XNA Game Development studio

for WP7

Developer Registration Utility: Used to unlock your device for

development

XAP Deployment Tool: For transferring XAP files directly to your phone

So, let's get started with a simple application first for this series. We'll

starting looking into the different 'features' of the WP7 platform and how to

develop for it in later parts. So go ahead and install the tools first.

Your First WP7 App



To start off, open up Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone — or if

you already had a version of VS2010 installed, fire it up and go to the New

Project window. Here select Visual C# | Silverlight for Windows Phone | Windows

Phone Application. Give it a name like WP7HelloWorld and create it.

When the project is loaded, you will by default see the Windows Phone 7

designer on the left pane and the Silverlight XAML on the right. XAML and

Silverlight is out of scope of this article but PCQuest has carried detailed

articles on developing Silverlight applications earlier. You can also find a

number of Silverlight tutorials on the Web.

You first app for WP7 - a tiny Twitter client in 2 min.	Using the OSK to interact with the app.

For this sample, let's first do something very simple. Select the TextBlock

that says 'MY APPLICATION'. You can change this over in the property window on

the right to say 'MY FIRST WP7 APP'. Now select the 'page name' text block and

find the TextBlock element in the XAML pane whose name is 'PageTitle'. Change

the Text value to 'first page'. You will immediately see the changes reflect in

the designer window. Now open the toolbox and drop in a TextBox, a button and a

WebBrowser control. Change the first two controls' texts to ' and 'View'.

Double click the button to enter its click event handler and enter the following

code.

private void button1_Click(object sender,

RoutedEventArgs e)



{


webBrowser1.Navigate(new


Uri(string.Format("http://twitter.com/{0}", textBox1.Text)));


}






Save both the files and press F5 to compile and debug the application. By
default, the app will be deployed to the WP7 Emulator. So wait while the

emulator boots up and the Silverlight .XAP file is deployed to the emulator.

Once ready , the application is launched automatically. You can now start using

it. For entering text into the textbox you can either use the on screen keyboard

that automatically appears or press “Pause/Break” on your keyboard and then

simply type as you would normally. Press the 'View' button to load the Twitter

account into the Web control. In a single line of code and 2 minutes of time,

you've actually built a small Twitter client for WP7! Also remember that since

this is running in 'Debug' mode in VS2010, you can use breakpoints, watches and

all the other development tools built into VS to work with your application. You

can also open the app in Blend to make its interface much more dynamic. But

we'll take a look at all of this in the coming months.

For now, WP7 is still in the hands of only a few. But with the WP7 developer

tools, you can get a taste of the platform as well as start developing

applications for it right now so that a completely new market is available to

your app as soon as the devices arrive by the end of this year.

Related Articles:

Win Phone 7: Data Binding & Storing Persistent Data Writing code

Developing Windows Phone 7 Application

Managing State in the Application Lifecycle