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Essential Windows Phone 7.5: Application Development with Silverlight: Writing Your First Phone Application

  • Dec 20, 2011
This chapter will walk you through setting up a machine for authoring your very first Windows Phone Silverlight application.
This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Essential Windows Phone 7.5: Application Development with SilverlightEssential Windows Phone 7.5: Application Development with Silverlight

Learn More Buy

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Essential Windows Phone 7.5: Application Development with SilverlightEssential Windows Phone 7.5: Application Development with Silverlight

Learn More Buy

While the press might have you believe that becoming a phone-app millionaire is a common occurrence, it's actually pretty rare, but that doesn't mean you won't want to create applications for the phone. Hopefully the days of cheap and useless but popular phone apps are over, and we can start focusing on phone-app development as being a way to create great experiences for small and large audiences. Microsoft's vision of three screens is becoming a reality, as the phone is joining the desktop and the TV as another vehicle for you to create immersive experiences for users.

Although understanding Windows Phone capabilities and services is a good start, you are probably here to write applications. With that in mind, this chapter will walk you through setting up a machine for authoring your very first Windows Phone Silverlight application.

Preparing Your Machine

Before you can start writing applications for the phone, you must install the Windows Phone Developer Tools. Go to http://create.msdn.com to download the tools called Windows Phone SDK 7.1. This website is the starting point for downloading the tools as well as accessing the forums if you have further questions about creating applications.

Windows Phone Versioning Confusion

At the time of this writing there is a difference in how the phone and the underlying operating system are named. The phone itself is marketed as "Windows Phone 7.5" but the operating system is called "Windows Phone OS 7.1" and the development tools are called "Windows Phone SDK 7.1." This can be confusing, but if you remember the phone is "7.5" and all the software is "7.1" it can help.

To install the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 you must meet the minimum system requirements shown in Table 2.1.

Table 2.1. Windows Phone Developer Tools Requirements

Requirement

Description

Operating system

Windows 7, x86 or x64 (all but Starter Edition); or

Windows Vista SP2, x86 or x64 (all but Starter Edition)

Memory

3GB RAM

Disk space

4GB free space

Graphics card

DirectX 10 capable card with a WDDM 1.1 driver

Once you meet the requirements, you can run the vm_web.exe file that you downloaded from the website to install the Windows Phone SDK 7.1. The SDK installer includes Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, Microsoft Blend Express for Windows Phone (the Express version of Microsoft Expression Blend), and the Software Development Kit (SDK). Visual Studio Express is the coding environment for Windows Phone. Blend Express is the design tool for phone applications. And the SDK is a set of libraries for creating phone applications and an emulator for creating applications without a device.

TIP

The Windows Phone SDK 7.1 does not work well in a virtual machine (e.g., Virtual PC, VMware, etc.) and is not officially supported. The emulator is a virtual machine of the phone, so running a virtual machine in a virtual machine tends to cause problems, especially slow performance.

Visual Studio is the primary tool for writing the code for your phone applications. Although the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 installs a version of Visual Studio 2010 Express specifically for phone development, if you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed on your machine the phone tools will also be integrated into this version of Visual Studio. The workflow for writing code in both versions of Visual Studio is the same. Although both versions offer the same features for developing applications for the phone, in my examples I will be using Visual Studio Express Edition for Windows Phone. In addition, I will be using Blend Express, not the full version of Blend (i.e., Expression Blend).

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