Slow start

I've yet to do more than compile a few intro Windows Phone apps and take a look. Part of the reason is that the Windows 7 Phone Series CTP, which comes with Visual Studio 2010 Express, can't co-exist on a machine that already has Visual Studio 2010, which my one machine has. The add-on to the full Visual Studio 2010 that will allow WP7S development hasn't been released yet, so I'm unable to work on that machine.

My first intuition was to run a virtual machine that doesn't have VS2010 installed, but of course the virtualization of the phone hardware doesn't play nicely inside a virtual machine (nor next to a virtual machine, for that matter).

And, my other Windows 7 machine which I purposefully left without VS2010, specifically for WP7S development with the CTP... doesn't have a DirectX 10-compatible videocard, so I can only do Silverlight-related development on that machine -- no XNA.

Not all is lost, however. I've been browsing the UI Design and Interaction Guide for WP7S, which is interesting, if not a bit zealous. I'm also reading the Special Excerpt from Programming Windows Phone 7 Series by Charles Petzold, which works through at a good pace, but would really be more fun if I could play along while reading...

My O'Relly XNA book is being neglected for now because of my lack of an XNA-able videocard. Granted, I could try some XNA development on the non-WP7S machine, but... I haven't. I've got no Silverlight book, and all I've seen available have been for Silverlight 2, and I believe they're calling the WP7S version Silverlight 4, so I don't think I'll be picking up a book on the subject quite yet.

The O'Reilly C# 4.0 in a Nutshell book has been very good, giving me exposure to all sorts of good, new features in C# that I've already forgotten about and will reread about months later and curse not using. I've got a few non-WP7S projects that I'm working on with C#, to get to know the language better so I'm more comfortable when I start doing some phone development.

Expression Blend is being pushed quite a bit as the manner in which you design layouts and UI in WP7S, and I've never touched it before. I've installed it, watched a few videos on Channel9, but that's it. I've never been a good interface designer, and since a phone is all about design, I'm going to be thrown headfirst into it. Luckily, there will be a bunch of Silverlight templates to be used and keep me on track.

I'm hoping in the next week to play with more samples, modify them, and actually get a feeling that I've written my own first WP7S app.