Professional Mobile Application Development

Chapter 8

Getting Started with Windows Phone 7

This chapter covers the basics of developing for Windows Phone 7 — how to acquire the tooling and basic design patterns, and preparing to distribute your application to the marketplace. During this chapter you are expected to configure your development machine to run Windows, install Visual Studio and the Windows Phone 7 SDK, and go over the examples from the Derby App. This chapter also covers the specific situations in which Windows Phone 7 breaks away from other smartphone platforms.

NEW KID ON THE BLOCK

Although the Windows Mobile 6.5 design was significantly different from the last major version (6.1), it had been lambasted by critics as change for change’s sake. It used design elements from the Zune UI at that time. It was never part of Microsoft’s mobile platform blueprints, and was released as a stopgap until the release of Windows Phone 7. It has now been superseded by Windows Embedded Handheld 6.5 for Enterprise Handheld Devices.

Windows Phone 7 is not the next iteration of the Windows Mobile platform, but is its successor. It has been built specifically for the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor family. Since being launched in November 2010 it has had two major revisions. The first, NoDo, primarily added copy-and-paste functionality. The second, Mango, added an update to the included mobile browser and multitasking for third-party developed apps. Whereas iOS and Android have a passive or reactive dashboard for their applications, ...