14 DAY TRIAL // During the MIX10 conference, Redmond-based software company Microsoft announced the launch of a series of tools for developers willing to build applications for the newly unveiled Windows Phone 7 Series devices, and it also made a Windows Phone Training Kit available along with them. The company brought to light a series of Windows Phone (WP) demos, and unveiled to the world that developers can benefit from a Windows Phone Developer Tools Community Technology Preview, as well as from other tools made available for free for them.
“We recognize that one of the success criteria for a popular consumer platform is having a large ecosystem of developers writing games and applications. Developers require tools and guidance to create compelling applications. […] As part of our effort to help you jumpstart development of your Windows Phone applications, we released the Windows Phone Training Kit for Developers. You can download a local copy of the training kit, or you can go to the online version on Channel 9,” a recent post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog states.
There are four Hands-On Labs included in the kits, namely Hello Phone, Building Your First Windows Phone Application, Windows Phone Navigation and Controls and Game Development with XNA Framework for Windows Phone. Developers can benefit from these for free, and the same applies to other solutions for building applications for Windows Phone 7, as the entire environment is made available for them for free, the blog post notes. The Windows Phone Developer Training Kit is available for download in the Microsoft Download Center.
The Hello Phone lab will offer a glimpse at the tools and procedures needed for the building and testing Silverlight for apps. The lab shows how Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phones, Expression Blend can be used for app development, as well as what the deployment and debugging of apps involve. The Building Your First Windows Phone Application lab shows how to start a new project, how to add code, test and debug, and is focused more on phone features like navigation, using pages, multi-touch and more.
The Windows Phone Navigation and Controls lab details the Windows Phone layout system, a series of new controls, and the phone’s chrome. It also shows the navigation between screens in a Windows Phone Silverlight application. As for the Game Development with XNA Framework for Windows Phone lab, it shows what XNA game development on Windows Phones is all about. Developers will be delivered with the basics of XNA game building, and also shows how Visual 2010 Express for Windows Phone can be used for delivering games for handsets.