Today, during the Mix opening keynote, we saw some amazingly cool Windows Phone (WP) demos. Although Windows Phone was announced about a month ago, today we heard the complete end-to-end story for both the user and the developer. On top of that, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of the Windows Phone Developer Tools Community Technology Preview.

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. The process of obtaining the development tools and getting started should be, as much as possible, friction free, easy, and welcoming. Hence you will love to learn that in order to get started developing for WP, all you need is to download and install is a single installer. But the best news is that the entire WP development environment is free! Yes, you read it right; everything you need to develop, test, and ultimately deploy your WP application is packed into a single 300MB (give or take) installer that is free to anyone using the Community Technology Preview CTP version as well as the final released version.

C9 Training Kit 01

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.

Both kits include four Hands-On Labs:

Hello Phone - This lab intends to be the classic “Hello World” application, introducing you to the tools and procedures required to build and test Silverlight for Windows Phone applications. During the lab, you will see how to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phones, Expression Blend to build and design your Windows Phone applications, and how to deploy and debug your Windows Phone application on the Windows Phone Emulator

Building Your First Windows Phone Application – This lab introduces you to the basic building blocks of any Windows Phone Silverlight application. During the course of this lab you will create a simple puzzle game. The lab takes you through the different stages of starting a new project, adding controls and code behind, and testing and debugging. Unlike the Hello World lab, this lab focuses more on a few phone-related topics like navigation, using pages, frame and navigation services, multi-touch, and isolated storage.


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Windows Phone Navigation and Controls – This lab introduces you to the Windows Phone layout system, the phone’s chrome, and few new controls. The lab explains the basics of navigating between different screens (pages) in a Windows Phone Silverlight application. During the lab you will build a navigation application that switches between various screens, with each screen displaying different phone functionality, such as playing an audio or video file.

Game Development with XNA Framework for Windows Phone – This lab introduces you to XNA game development on Windows Phones, as well as to the basics of XNA game development. During the lab you will build a simple XNA game application that introduces key concepts in XNA game development and learn how to use Microsoft Visual 2010 Express for Windows Phone to build and design your XNA games for Windows Phones

Feedback about Windows Phone as well as this post is welcome @ wp7tk@microsoft.com.

Good luck and most importantly, have fun!

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