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This book, while initially marketed at those iPhone developers seeking to adapt their iPhone skills to the world of Silverlight and WP7, is for any developer looking to build WP7 applications. This includes people who have never written a mobile application before as well as those of you looking to build the same application for both iPhone and WP7 platforms and share as much code as possible.

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Q1. Andrej - please introduce yourself briefly (experience, interests, key projects, etc) and tell us more about the application you created - what are the key functionalities, major differences from other similar applications on the market, why do you think people would want to install this app on their WP7?

A. My name is Andrej Tozon and I’m working as a contractor with my own company in Slovenia. I’ve been developing for Windows for nearly 20 years now, working through a lot of technologies and languages in my past. Currently, my primary work interests are Silverlight, WPF and, lately, Windows Phone 7. I’m also a Client Application Development MVP.
My first WP7 application, Hey weigh!, is a simple weight tracking tool, which you can use to track your weight. It’s a very basic, free app that lets you enter your weight for a day and keeps history for last 30 days. History is, besides in a scrolling list, also represented by a line chart. I wanted to keep it simple and clean so I only included those features I myself thought I needed to track my weight, so I could also say that it was a very personal project :) If that basic feature set and the looks appeal to other people, that’s great. There are other similar apps on the marketplace, offering additional features and users may find them more useful than mine. And that’s what’s so great and important about taking part in the large, global marketplace – you offer your vision of an application and watch the users all over the world responding to it.

At the end of the previous part of this series we created a very simple application, starting from the Visual Studio 2010 template, at the sole scope of showing how simple is to create a Silverlight project and having it deployed to the phone for development purposes. We easily ran the Hallo Windows Phone application directly from the IDE and debugged it as we are habit with all the other common project types.

If we go deep inside the project structure we encounter some little differences from a normal Silverlight project made for the desktop.

This article is part 2 of the series "XNA for Silverlight developers":

• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 0 – Why should I care? 
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 1 – Fundamentals 
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 2 – Text rendering

Rendering text output in a game is not as fundamental as it is in other apps or business applications. However, it still is a very important part because you will need this everywhere: to render statistics like the current player score on the screen, to show messages or help text, and of course also for additional features and parts of your game that are not related to the game play itself, like menus or high score screens.

This article is Part 2 of “A classic memory game”:

• A classic memory game: Part 1 – Designing the game 
• A classic memory game: Part 2 – The game logic, connecting the ViewModel and the View
• A classic memory game: Part 3 – Porting the game to Windows Phone 7

The series is about building the following classic memory game in Silverlight, and porting it to Windows Phone 7. In the first article we started a new MVVM Light project, created the controls and designed the game-states.

This article is Part 1 of “A classic memory game”:

• A classic memory game: Part 1 – Designing the game
• A classic memory game: Part 2 – The game logic, connecting the ViewModel and the View
• A classic memory game: Part 3 – Porting the game to Windows Phone 7

Introduction

My wife has started learning Silverlight and because of my Expression Blend skills are still lacking, we have decided to build the following classic memory game so both of us can learn something new. We kept things simple but we respected basic Silverlight principles.

Last November Microsoft released its brand new Windows Phone 7 operating system, and many of you may have already bought one of the many models it can be found on the market. If you are, like me, passionate of tech-toys, probably you have already started to play with it, downloading tons of applications from the marketplace and you have permeated your life with the beautiful features of this phone. Now, since if you are reading this pages probably you are also passionate about programming with Silverlight, it is the right moment to get deeply in touch with your phone discovering how you can write your own applications, test them on your device and finally publish them to the marketplace to possibly start earn some money, I'm pretty sure you will use to buy your next toy.

This article is Part 1 of the series “XNA for Silverlight developers”:

• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 0 - Why should I care?
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 1 - Fundamentals
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 2 - Text rendering

For Silverlight developers who want to delve into XNA, the hard part is not learning the new set of classes in the library, but the fundamental difference in programming style for some parts of XNA compared to Silverlight. Especially when you have no experience in game programming, you might find some things confusing or even illogical. In the first part of this article, I want to give an overview and explanation of the biggest differences. You will run across all these topics again in the following articles in more detail.

This article is Part 0 of the series “XNA for Silverlight developers”:

• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 0 - Why should I care?
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 1 - Fundamentals
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 2 - Text rendering

Introduction

Around the time the first Windows Phone 7 devices were released to the market, one popular sentence you heard was "every Silverlight developer is a Windows Phone 7 developer" – and that's true. Silverlight is Microsoft's main platform to do Windows Phone 7 development, and every desktop Silverlight programmer will feel comfortable in the new mobile programming environment instantly. Sure there are differences and libraries specific to the devices, but you won't have to learn a new programming language or new ways to define your UI, and you can use the same development environment you've been using for normal Silverlight development all the time.