Slow Progression

I'm definitely not whipping out any Twitter apps or 3D games, but I'm finally getting my feet wet with Windows Phone 7 development.

I finished the Windows Phone 7 Training Kit "Hello Windows Phone" lab the other day (link at the right) only to have them release three more labs as part of the April release update. It rushes you through a lot of the Expression Blend and Silverlight stuff, which is the material I know absolutely nothing about, but I can always go back and tinker. For now, it's all magic.

I got my new DirectX 10-capable video card yesterday, which meant I was able to continue going through Charles Petzold's preview of his Programming Windows Phone Series book (link at right) at the XNA portion where I stopped. I then spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out why the project wasn't doing what it should; it wasn't failing with an error about my lack of video card support, as it did before... near the end of the evening I remembered seeing something flash by my RSS feed about an update on Petzold's blog, and sure enough, he had updates to the sourcecode that included fixes for changes to the April CTP release. This will teach me not to a) not read the release notes for the CTP; and b) not read my Windows Phone 7 RSS feed before coding. If you're wondering: XNA apps now require setting the back buffer size, which was missing in the original code.

I've (re-)started reading the two preview chapters of O'Reilly's Learning Windows Phone (link at right) as well, now that I have a working system. It's very introductory, and will likely have me do similar things as the Training Kit's first lab did, but since I'm still just ramping up my development here, repetition is probably good. It's unfortunate that that book isn't slated for publication until November 2010 -- I expect/hope that I'll be well-versed enough in WP7 development that the book will be useless to me by that time.

If you're just getting started with Windows Phone 7, the Windows Phone 7 in 7 series of tutorials (link at right) is a good way to get a glimpse at the layout, design and environment of WP7 development. As the name hints, each video is seven minutes long, so it won't kill you to watch them all.


Did you get the hint that this post was largely about the sets of links on the side of the blog? I'm aiming to keep those as current as possible with any information that gets published about WP7, whether design or development. If this interests you, please return often, and if you have links that you think I'm missing, please let me know.