Beginning Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Windows® Phone Applications Using Silverlight® and XNA®

GETTING STARTED WITH WINDOWS PHONE 7 DEVELOPMENT

Now that you have some history of the Windows Mobile platform and a high-level understanding of the Windows Phone 7 architecture, it's time to get moving toward real application development. By now you're no doubt excited about the endless possibilities in store for your own app development and ready to get your hands on the development tools.

To get started, you need to first get a copy of Visual Studio. Although we cover Expression Blend in Chapter 12, the majority of this book and exercises utilize Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone. If you happen to have an existing copy of Visual Studio 2010 Professional or better, that works, too; you just need to download and install the Windows Phone 7 developer tools. The installation package can detect existing Visual Studio 2010 installations, so you don't have to worry about that.

After downloading the installation package, you start the program and follow the onscreen wizard steps. There isn't much to it other than accepting the licensing agreement. Once the process completes, you can start developing Windows Phone 7 solutions.

Navigating through Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition

The installation process takes care of installing Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition, the required Silverlight tools for Windows Phone 7, and the emulator that you use for testing applications right from your local machine. At this point, you need to get familiar with the Visual Studio environment, ...