Welcome to my blog of Windows Phone 7 Development. In this series of posts, I will try to explain various concepts in Windows Phone 7 Development. We will try to learn how to develop applications for Windows Phone 7. So lets start.
In this post we will see how to set up Windows Phone 7 Development environment.
Introduction:
Windows Phone 7 Development targets developing applications for Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system developed by Microsoft..NET framework is used to do Windows Phone 7 Development created by Microsoft. We can use any one of the several languages supported by the .NET framework, like C# to write applications which gets executed inside of a runtime environment called the Common Language Runtime. There are two distinct development approaches you can take when creating your application.
First Approach:
The first approach is to use Silverlight for Windows Phone. Silverlight is used by developers to create rich internet applications. A Silverlight application uses declarative markup (called XAML) to create user interface and code written in a .NET framework language to control an application’s behavior. For developing a data driven application for Windows Phone 7, we need to use Silverlight.
Second Approach:
The second approach is to use the XNA framework to develop your Windows Phone 7 app. It is Microsoft’s game development framework and has been used in recent years to create both Windows and Xbox 360 applications. If you’re creating a game for Windows Phone 7, you’ll likely use the XNA framework. The XNA framework is quite powerfu and need a great deal of learning curve and longer development cycles.
Installing SDK:
The Windows Phone 7 SDK is supported with one of the below operating systems except starter ( express ) versions
- Windows Vista
- Windows 7
Hardware Requirements :
- Minimum 4GB hard disk space
- Minimum 3GB RamDirectX 10 or above capable graphics card with a WDDM 1.1 driver
http://dev.windows.com/en-us/develop/download-phone-sdk
- Windows Phone SDK 7.1
- Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 Update
This will install the following in your system
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express For Windows Phone
- Windows Phone Emulator
- Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Assemblies
- Silverlight 4 SDK and DRT
- Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Extensions for XNA Game Studio 4.0
- Micorosoft Expression Blend SDK for Windows Phone 7
- Microsoft Expression Blend SDK for Windows Phone OS 7.1
- WCF Data Services Client for Windows Phone
- Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows Phone
Conclusion:
In this post we saw what are the hardward and software requirements to develop Windows Phone 7 applications and how we can install Windows Phone 7 SDK that will install the required components to start developing Windows Phone 7 applications.
In next post we will develop our first Windows Phone 7 application which is Hello World application.
I hope you enjoyed reading this post as much as I did while writing it. Please feel free to let me know your valuable and constructive comments and suggestions which can help me to make this article better and improve my technical and written skills. Last but not the least please excuse me for my grammar and typos.
Thanks and have a nice and wonderful day.
