Mobile Development with C#

Windows Phone

Now that the iOS and Android applications are up and running, that brings us to Windows Phone. In order to develop for the Windows Phone platform, you must be running either Windows Vista or Windows 7. While there are numerous steps to getting started on the other platforms (even though Xamarin simplifies this somewhat with their chain installers) getting started with Windows Phone requires much less effort. In order to begin, you must download the Windows Phone SDK, which can be found at create.msdn.com. The SDK installer includes all of the tools you need to get started, including the IDE. If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed on your computer, you will be able to continue using that, but in case you don’t, the installer also includes the free Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone. The Windows Phone emulator is also included in the install, as well as various other packages to help out with development.

Note

There have been multiple releases of both the Windows Phone SDK and versions of the operating system. This book is going to assume that you have downloaded and installed version 7.1 or later of the Windows Phone SDK, which includes support for both Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.5, codenamed Mango. The Mango release included many new features, some of which we’ll touch on later in this book.

There are two main development paths for Windows Phone applications: Silverlight and XNA. XNA is essentially focused on game development, and is also ...