Gergely Orosz

In my previous post I’ve listed resources to help getting started with Silverlight for WP7 developers.

This article aims to collect the most important resources developers should go through in order to learn the WP7 ecosystem and build decent Windows Phone 7 applications using Silverlight.

Tools To Get Started Developing

• Download the free developer tools (installs Visual Studio Expression or project templates, Expression Blend for WP7 or project templates for Expression Blend 4) (you can get them from the Windows Phone 7 developer site developer home page as well). You’ll need this to get started with development.
• Download the Windows Phone 7 Silverlight training kit – it features some very useful examples with explained source code. I suggest going through it, or at least the parts you feel are relevant to what you want to develop.
• Download the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit. This component contains some essential classes for development such as GestureService (simplifying detection of gestures), DatePicker, TimePicker, WrapPanel and ToggleSwitch.

Get a Feel for Metro, the WP7 UI

To develop good WP7 applications it’s important to get the feel of the WP7 user interface, Metro. I suggest going through the following resources to get familiar with it:

• Windows Phone Design System – Codename Metro – this whitepaper helps understand the motivation behind Metro
• Windows Phone 7 UI design guidelines – worth flipping through and holding on for it for future reference.
  Also worth Taking a look at the structure of the panorama and pivot controls – these are two controls unique to WP7.
• Pictures and videos of some conceptually well designed WP7 applications:
  • USGA Golf:  pictures and video
  • Twitter, Seesmic, Foursquare
  • Twit.TV, AP news
• Windows Phone 7 Design Templates. These are useful templates to give your application a WP7 look and feel.

Coding Resources for Windows Phone 7

• Windows Phone development resources on MSDN. These are quite in depth tutorials on specific topics from getting started all the way to specic WP7 features like the location service, accelerometer API, trial API and so on.
• Programming Windows Phone 7 book – a great and free e-book on WP7, though not yet finalized
• Windows Phone 7 in 7 - 20 to 30 great 7 minute video tutorials on various aspects of Windows Phone 7 development. Highly recommended.
• WP7 code samples on MSDN – if you find an application with a similar concept to what you want to build, looking at its source code is a good start!
• Creating High Performing Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone – a whitepaper with lots of advice on creating good and performant WP7 applications
• If developing a larger application, it’s worth following MVVM guidelines. Get to know MVVM in 3 easy steps and download the MVVM Light toolkit. Also learn how to unit test your WP7 project.

Other Useful Resources

• 130 Metro Icons for Windows Phone 7. If you’ll use the application bar, chances are you’ll use some of these icons or want to design ones similar in style to these.
• Creating a custom application bar icon at kirupa.com – an article explaining how to create application bar icons that look good both on dark and white themes.
• Collection of theme resources for WP7. Bookmark this page so you can reference as StaticResource from your phone – you’ll be using this often when coding in Visual Studio. Expression Blend has built in support for these though – another reason to use it for designing your application.
• Frame rate counter on the emulator: read Jeff Wilcox’s blog post on how to enable/disable it
• Designing Windows Phone 7 applications - a short article worth reading on basic considerations for designing WP7 applications.

Further Lists of WP7 Resources

• Windows Phone development resources on MSDN. A very well structured list pointing to detailed tutorials and whitepapers.
• An extensive list of categorized WP7 resources by Jeff Blankenburg
• Another great list of WP7 resources by Mark Kirby

Hope you found this list helpful, good luck with developing!