VS2010 + Windows Phone 7

Catching up on my C#/Silverlight/XNA RSS feeds, I read a Sgt. Conker article regarding Visual Studio 2010 RC and the Windows Phone 7 CTP.

In the past few weeks, I've been having quite the war with the VS2010 Ultimate Beta 2 and the Windows Phone 7 CTP, mainly because they're not compatible, and thus I can only have one installed at a time. On one machine, one of them won out, on the other, the other. That is, until VS2010 RC was released, at which point I uninstalled Ultimate Beta 2 (couldn't upgrade from that), and then ... decided to just install the Phone CTP.


And now I find out that I didn't have to make a decision, but that the CTP *will* work on top of RC just fine, which means I get to uninstall the CTP on two machines, install Visual Studio 2010, and then reinstall CTP on top, with the guidance mentioned in the article above. And, since VS2010 is actually released now (not Release Candidate, as far as I know), I can go directly to that.

All this for the XNA portion of the WP7 tools to tell me that the video card on one of my machines isn't up to snuff, relegating it to Silverlight-only development. And I'm too cheap to go buy a new video card.

So far.

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.