Programming Windows Phone 7, by Charles Petzold. Microsoft Press, Copyright © 2010 by Microsoft Corporation. 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. 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. To illustrate Silverlight and XNA programming concepts, this book describes about 190 complete programs. Many of them are small and simple, but others are larger and more interesting. Silverlight, a spinoff of the client-based Windows Presentation Foundation ( WPF ), has already given Web programmers unprecedented power to develop sophisticated user interfaces with a mix of traditional controls, high-quality text, vector graphics, media, animation, and data binding that run on multiple platforms and browsers. Windows Phone 7 extends Silverlight to mobile devices. XNA—the three letters stand for something like “XNA is Not an Acronym”—is Microsoft’s game platform supporting both 2D sprite-based and 3D graphics with a traditional game-loop architecture. Although XNA is mostly associated with writing games for the Xbox 360 console, developers can also use XNA to target the PC itself, as well as Microsoft’s classy audio player, the Zune HD. Generally you’ll choose Silverlight for writing programs you might classify as applications or utilities. These programs are built from a combination of markup and code. The markup is the Extensible Application Markup Language, or XAML and pronounced “zammel.” XNA is primarily for writing high-performance games ( 2D and 3D games ). You can certainly use Silverlight for writing games and you can even write traditional applications using XNA, although doing so might sometimes be challenging. In particular, Silverlight might be ideal for games that are less graphically oriented, or use vector graphics rather than bitmap graphics, or are paced by user-time rather than clock-time. A Tetris-type program might work quite well in Silverlight. You’ll probably find XNA to be a bit harder to stretch into Silverlight territory, however. Implementing a list box in XNA might be considered “fun” by some programmers but a torture by many others.

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