The Windows Phone From Scratch Mini-Tutorials: #1: Getting Started

This is the first in the Windows From Scratch mini-tutorial series.  This series assumes you have no experience with Silverlight nor with C#, nor .NET in general, but would like to learn to program the Windows Phone.

Hardware and Software Requirements

Hardware

For all practical purposes, your choices come down to using a PC (or a Mac with Bootcamp)  and…

• 3 GB of disk space
• 2GB of RAM
• A DirectX 10 capable graphics card with the WDDM 1.1 driver.

Software

The Operating System

• Windows 7 or Windows Vista.  In either case, any edition and both 32bit and 64 bit are fine, but you cannot use the Starter Edition of either for WP7 development.

One Free Download With All The Software

• Windows Phone Developer Tools This one free download includes everything you’ll need once your Operating System is in place:
  • Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone Beta
  • Windows Phone Emulator Beta
  • Silverlight for Windows Phone Beta
  • Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone Beta
  • XNA Game Studio 4.0 Beta

That’s it.

Note that there are numerous programs in which you can get Visual Studio 2010 (the full edition) and much more, for no cost. Among these are the BizSpark, Dream Spark and WebSiteSpark

The Marketplace

To sell your WP7 applications through the Marketplace, you have only to register, which you can do at the App Hub .