Chapter 2
The Development Environment
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER
- How to build your applications
- Methods for testing applications
- Using the Windows Phone Emulator
- How to publish your applications
Before exploring the details of programming for Windows Phone 7 (WP7), you need to become familiar with the WP7 development environment. The development environment for a mobile platform usually includes an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to write your applications, build tools to create the executables, source-level debugging tools to debug the application and tune performance, device emulators to simulate the device environment, and much more.
WP7 provides a developer with a friendly development environment by relying on the features of Visual Studio. In short, you don’t have to learn a new development tool to work with WP7. The WP7 development tools are almost as powerful as those that Visual Studio provides for developing desktop applications and games. At first sight these tools may even seem to be overkill for mobile development. However, by using these powerful tools to reduce the work of coding, developers can spend more time creatively thinking about application design and features. The following sections describe the WP7 development environment in detail.
OVERVIEW
Windows Phone Developer Tools provide the fundamental functionality required for WP7 development. You can obtain these tools and the corresponding release notes at http://create.msdn.com/home/getting_started ...
