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

Posted on October 25, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

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


WindowsPhone 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.
Note: you cannot run the Windows Phone 7 (WP7) Emulator under a virtual machine such as Parallels or Fusion

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 .

About Jesse Liberty

Jesse Liberty has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects and is the author of 2 dozen books and a couple dozen online courses. His latest book, Building APIs with .NET will be released early in 2025. Liberty is a Senior SW Engineer for CNH and he was a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T, a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. He is a Microsoft MVP.
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4 Responses to The Windows Phone From Scratch Mini-Tutorials: #1: Getting Started

  1. Christian says:
    February 11, 2011 at 9:58 am

    @Stephen Borders

    You inspire me… To be honest I think Paul’s instruction seems to be a bit too assuming. I have been compiling a list. email me if you would like some books and more info I have found across the web for programming wp7 like Charles’s book which is awesome, free, and great.

    [email protected]

  2. Don says:
    December 1, 2010 at 12:49 am

    Jesse, thanks for this tutorial series. David Kelley got me pumped up about developing Silverlight apps, and I’m going to go through this tutorial set for W7 phone.

  3. Stephen Borders says:
    November 1, 2010 at 8:13 pm

    I found your blog at Paul Thurrott’s site. I have been trying to learn. (I am a automotive technician). Just want to learn something new. thanks for doing this

  4. Magesh says:
    October 25, 2010 at 8:58 am

    the URL for “Windows Phone Developer Tools” (http://www.bitly.com/WP7tools) seems to have broken.

Comments are closed.