Windows Phone 7 Resources

Posted on October 28, 2010 by

We’re starting to do a lot more hands-on events/meetings/meetups where people as me “what stuff should I install before I come out there?”. Well, here’s my list of tools to get you started. I’ll keep this updated as new and interesting toolkits come out as well as trying to keep up with the ever evolving Windows Phone 7 development platform. Some of these aren’t tied specifically to WP7, but are valuable all the same for WP7 development.

Getting Started

  • Windows Phone 7: although not related directly to development, WindowsPhone7.com offers a LOT of great information about the different phones available, and is great for driving excitement with consumers, developers and TDMs alike.
  • App Hub: this is the central hub of information for managing your WP7 development. You can download the tools here as well as get updates on information coming from the WP7 team and manage your marketplace account.
  • Dreamspark: if you are a high school or college student, you might qualify for our Dreamspark program, which offers the professional version of many of our development and design tools for free to qualifying students, as well as a FREE pass to the App Hub. If you’ve already got MSDN Academic Aliance (AA) then you’ve already got better versions of the tools, but you’ll still want to register for Dreamspark becuase of the free  marketplace pass.
  • Windows Phone Marketplace – the marketplace is now available for online viewing. You can still get in with the Zune software, or from your device, but this is great for casual searching for applications.
  • Windows Phone 7 Best Practices Wiki: this wiki, created by Silverlight expert Justin Angel, is a great resource for learning about and sharing best practices for Windows Phone 7.
  • DevFish’s Technology Wiki: Joe Healy, DE in Florida, maintains a technology wiki and has a category defined for Windows Phone resources. He’s got several pages there that each have a lot of valuable links.

Training Resources

Source Code

I have all my demo source code published on my GitHub site at http://github.com/chriskoenig.  Feel free to peruse anything that’s there and use it however you like.

Design and Development Guides

There are a couple of guides that you should become familiar with before designing and submitting your application into the Windows Phone Marketplace

  • UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7: This guide provides information on how to design a Metro-compatible UX for your application. Learn this, know this and live this guide.
  • Application Certification Requirements for Windows Phone: provides the policies and technical requirements that a Windows Phone application or game must meet to pass certification and to be eligible for listing in Windows Phone Marketplace. If you want your app to be certified for the marketplace, you’ve got to follow these rules.
  • Windows Phone 7 Design Templates: This is a project for sharing XAML based resources for creating consistent Windows Phone 7 user experiences. The templates are based on the UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7. With these templates you can easily create common Windows Phone UI layouts by simply copying and pasting the desired page. They’ve taken care of the margins, styling, and custom controls that may not be available in the platform.

Starter Kits

To help people get a jump-start on developing applications for Windows Phone, we’ve created a set of Windows Phone Starter Kits on the MSDN Code Gallery. Each of these kits is designed to make it easy to get a Windows Phone application up and running quickly, while still giving you the ability to customize, theme and adapt the source code to your needs. If you are interested in working on the Starter Kits, please contact me through my blog and we’ll get you connected.

Development Tools

  • Windows Phone 7.1 SDK: Includes Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, tooling integration with Visual Studio 2010 Professional, Premium and Ultimate, Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone (FREE!) and the Windows Phone emulator (NOT a simulator – the real, live OS running in a virtual machine).

Frameworks and Components

General Frameworks

  • CSLA.NET: CSLA is a software development framework that helps you build a powerful, maintainable business logic layer for Windows, Web, service-oriented and workflow applications.
  • NUnit: NUnit supports Unit Testing for Windows Phone applications.
  • Ninject: Ninject is a lightweight dependency injection framework for .NET applications. It helps you split your application into a collection of loosely-coupled, highly-cohesive pieces, and then glue them back together in a flexible manner.
  • Prism 4: Using design patterns that embody important architectural design principles, such as separation of concerns and loose coupling, Prism helps you to design and build applications using loosely coupled components that can evolve independently but that can be easily and seamlessly integrated into the overall application. Prism 4 includes reference implementations, QuickStarts, reusable library code (the Prism Library), and extensive documentation. This version of Prism targets the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Silverlight 4 and includes new guidance around the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, navigation, and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF).
  • Recipe: Push Notification Server Side Helper for WP7: The Push Notification Server Side Helper Library, a part of the Windows Phone 7 Push Recipe, provides an easy way for sending all three kinds of push notification messages currently supported by Microsoft Push Notification Services (MPNS): Tile, Toast and Raw.
  • WP7 Toolkit for Windows Azure: This toolkit is designed to make it easier for phone developers to leverage cloud services running in Windows Azure. The toolkit includes Visual Studio project templates for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure, class libraries optimized for use on the phone, sample applications, and documentation.

MVVM Toolkits

  • Galasoft MVVM Light Toolkit: This is, so far, my favorite toolkit for building MVVM applications on Windows Phone. You can install it via NuGet or manually – he has a “preview” version for Mango, just look for MVVMLight and you’ll see it there.
  • Update Controls: This is another great MVVM framework that supports WP7 written by Dallas local Michael Perry. The interesting thing about Update Controls is that it does not require that you implement INotifyPropertyChanged or declare a DependencyProperty. It connects controls directly to CLR properties and discovers dependencies upon data through layers of intermediate code. This makes it perfect for the MVVM pattern; no extra code is needed in the ViewModel, which sits between the Model and the View.
  • Caliburn Micro: A small, yet powerful implementation of Caliburn designed for WPF, Silverlight and WP7. The framework implements a variety of UI patterns for solving real-world problems. Patterns that are enabled include MVC, MVP, Presentation Model (MVVM), and Application Controller
  • Ultralight.mvvm: Created by Wintellect consultant Jeremy Likness, Ultralight.mvvm is a lightweight (< 300 lines, < 25KB) framework for developing MVVM Silverlight applications with support for tombstoning on Windows Phone.

Components and Libraries

  • Windows Phone Control Toolkit: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7. Controls include GestureService/GestureListener, ContextMenu, DatePicker, TimePicker, ToggleSwitch and WrapPanel. This is also installable via NuGet.
  • WP7Contrib: WP7 Contrib is a set of components to help build WP7 Apps. It can be plugged into MVVM Light or used as separate components in your App. The project includes a TON of amazing components, libraries, frameworks and more all wrapped into one easy-to-consume package.
  • Tombstone Helper (Codeplex): This component makes it really to save the state of your application during tombstoning.
  • Telerik RAD Controls for WP7: Announced at PDC10, RadControls for Windows Phone are built from the ground up for the Windows Phone 7 Operating System to deliver new user experience based on content and motion. The suite offers controls and capabilities that are currently not available in the UI Toolbox for Windows Phone 7 and not even in the OS. Combining Telerik’s expertise in Silverlight development and the capabilities of the Windows Phone
    platform, RadControls for Windows Phone are super light and blazing-fast controls for building mobile applications.
  • Microsoft Research Project “Hawaii”: a set of innovative cloud services hosted on Windows Azure for computation and data storage including Relay, Rendezvous, OCR, and Speech-to-Text.

Behaviors

I decided to start tracking Behaviors as well as these things come in REALLY handy for all the Blendability folks out there

  • MultiScaleImage Behavior: a.k.a. Silverlight DeepZoom. This behavior adds the necessary support for the MSI without writing any code!

Window Phone Database Info

As you know, Windows Phone Mango now ships with SQL Server CE and supports their Code First implementation pattern. I’ve written a blog post about this, but here are some other articles to help you out:

Marketing Resources

  • Windows Phone Marketing Kit: You can use the referenced guidelines and assets in communications and marketing materials about your Windows Phone Marketplace application.
  • Windows Phone 7 App Website Template: Use this one-page web site template to promote your application online and drive downloads of your app. The one-page format is really attractive – all you need to to is replace some colors, some simple config and add some custom images.

Additional Tools

  • Fiddler: This is a great network monitor tool to help you trace data flowing over the wire from your data source to your application. Note: there is a TRICK to getting Fiddler to work with your WP7 dev environment
  • Toolbox: Need some help in learning Expression Blend? Toolbox is your friend…
  • EQUATEC Profiler: The EQATEC Profiler is a code profiler for Windows Phone 7. It’s not a memory profiler – it’s all about making your app run faster, not about tracking objects and memory. The report will tell you exactly how many times each method was called and how long it took. You can then speedup your application by optimizing just the most expensive methods.
  • Isolated Storage Explorer: WP7 Isolated Storage Explorer is a tool designed to help developers and testers interact with the isolated storage file for Silverlight Windows Phone 7 applications. The explorer can work both as a desktop application for testers or integrated in Visual Studio for developers.
  • Windows Phone Power Tools: The Windows Phone Power Tools are a natural extension to the developer tools that come with the Windows Phone SDK. Instead of allowing you to only install developer xaps the Power Tools let
    you test update scenarios by allowing you to update an existing developer app. Instead of having to step through the IsolatedStorage file browser on the command line, the Power Tools provide a GUI to allow you to interact with your applications.
  • Windows Phone Icons Maker: This project makes the multple icons necessary to build and publish Windows Phone applications. When you build and register a Windows Phone application to Maketplace, you have to make 4 sizes of square icons and submit them with your application. Windows Phone Icons Maker makes these icon files for you from single image – quickly and easily. You just load up an image, trim it, and save the icons!

Other Resources