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Free ebook: Programming Windows Phone 7, by Charles Petzold


Free ebook: Programming Windows Phone 7, by Charles Petzold

Devon Musgrave 

10-28-2010 



9780735643352xGang, we’re done! 24 chapters, about 1,000 pages. Congratulations to Charles, who has outdone himself!
Speaking for Charles and for the Windows Phone 7 team, we hope that you will enjoy Programming Windows Phone 7:
You can download a PDF here (38.6 MB). [NEWER NOTE: the presentation issues have been fixed.] [OLDER NOTE: we see the comments from some of you about presentation issues with the ebook. We’ve determined that the PDF is missing a required embedded font. This is leading to odd (or worse) presentation for some of you, including bitmapped text. We’re working with the vendor to create a new file. I’ll let you know when the new file has replaced the old one in the Microsoft Download Center. We apologize for this!]
And, as of August 1, 2011, you can now download an EPUB version here and a MOBI version here.
To give you a sense of this offering, here is Charles’s Introduction—beneath that you’ll find the ebook’s full Table of Contents:
Introduction
This book is a gift from the Windows Phone 7 team at Microsoft to the programming community, and I am proud to have been a part of it. Within the pages that follow, I show you the basics of writing applications for Windows Phone 7 using the C# programming language with the Silverlight and XNA 2D frameworks.
Yes, Programming Windows Phone 7 is truly a free download, but for those readers who still love paper—as I certainly do—this book will also be available (for sale) divided into two fully-indexed print editions: Microsoft Silverlight Programming for Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft XNA Framework Programming for Windows Phone 7. [Note from Devon: we should have these ready for order in December 2010.]
With the money you’ve saved downloading this book, please buy other books. Despite the plethora of information available online, books are still the best way to learn about programming within a coherent and cohesive tutorial narrative. Every book sale brings a tear of joy to an author’s eye, so please help make them weep overflowing rivers.
In particular, you might want to buy other books to supplement the material in this book. For example, I barely mention Web services in this book, and that’s a serious deficiency because Web services are likely to become increasingly important in Windows Phone 7 applications. My coverage of XNA is limited to 2D graphics and while I hope to add several 3D chapters in the next edition of this book, I don’t really get into the whole Xbox LIVE community aspect of game development. Nor do I discuss any programming tools beyond Visual Studio—not even Expression Blend.
My publisher Microsoft Press has a couple additional Windows Phone 7 books coming soon: Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Development Step by Step by Andy Wigley & Peter Foot offers a more tools-oriented approach. Although Michael Stroh’sWindows Phone 7 Plain & Simple is a guide to using the phone rather than developing for it, I suspect it will give developers some insights and ideas.
Moreover, I also hear that my old friend Doug Boling is working hard on a Windows Phone 7 enterprise-programming book that is likely to be considered his masterpiece. Be sure to check out that one.

Organization

This book is divided into three parts. The first part discusses basic concepts of Windows Phone 7 programming using example programs that target both Silverlight and the XNA framework. It is likely that many Windows Phone 7 developers will choose either one platform or the other, but I think it’s important for all developers who have at least a little knowledge of the alternative to their chosen path.
The second part of this book focuses entirely on Silverlight, and the third part on XNA 2D. For your convenience, the chapters in each part build upon previous knowledge in a progressive tutorial narrative, and hence are intended to be read sequentially.

My Assumptions About You

I assume that you know the basic principles of .NET programming and you have a working familiarity with the C# programming language. If not, you might benefit from reading my free online book .NET Book Zero: What the C or C++ Programmer Needs to Know about C# and the .NET Framework, available from my website at www.charlespetzold.com/dotnet.

System Requirements

To use this book properly you’ll need to download and install the Windows Phone Developer Tools, which includes Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, XNA Game Studio 4.0, and an on-screen Windows Phone Emulator to test your programs in the absence of an actual device. Get the latest information and downloads at http://developer.windowsphone.com.
You can install these tools on top of Visual Studio 2010, in effect enhancing Visual Studio 2010 for phone development. That’s the configuration I used.
Although you can do quite a bit with the phone emulator, at some point you’ll want to deploy your programs to an actual Windows Phone 7 device. You can register as a phone developer at http://developer.windowsphone.com and then have the ability to unlock your phone so you can deploy your programs from Visual Studio.
Since late July 2010, I’ve had an LG GW910 phone to test the programs in this book. For the record, the final build I installed was 7.0.7003.0.

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