Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

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Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

posted @ Monday, March 15, 2010 11:00 AM | 29 Comments

So the news is out!

Silverlight IS the platform for Windows Phone 7 Series development!

Sweet. We also made available an update to Silverlight 4 that you might be interested in too!

Windows Phone 7 Series You may be wondering how you get started. If you are new to Silverlight, I recommend getting familiar with Silverlight first. You can find all the tools you will need at the Silverlight community site. In addition to the core tools you’ll want to get the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP. This will add to your Visual Studio 2010 installation (or install Visual Studio Express) to enable Windows Phone and XNA Game Studio development. Be sure to read the documentation on the release notes to understand any limitations. A link to the tools, documentation, developer/UX guides and more can be found on the Silverlight for Windows Phone page. The key elements you’d want to get are:

Windows Phone developer tools CTP (read the release notes)
Expression Blend 4 add-on for Windows Phone (Christian Schormann’s blog)

I’ve also taken some quick time to get some quick videos up for some tips and familiarity with the tools and some initial areas you’ll want to take a look at. Here are some starting videos for you:

The getting started video has some quick tips and tricks about the emulator and using the keyboard input control (referred to as the ‘SIP’). I suggest taking a look at these for some primer. If you have questions afterwards, check out the dedicated forum for Silverlight for Windows Phone.

I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ll develop using Silverlight for Windows Phone! Be sure also to watch for @ckindel and @wp7dev on Twitter for information about Windows Phone 7 Series development.

tags: silverlight, ria, xaml, xna, wp7dev, wp7, windows-phone, windows phone, winmo

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license.

Comments

Frank Cristallo

3/15/2010 11:38 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Great news today at MIX!
Tim , do you think in future will be any chances for Silverlight to be "fused" with XNA to port 3D games on browser / cross platforms?
Andrew

3/15/2010 10:39 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Hi Tim, i just download all the stuff for the phone and silverlight,
about the project template, on visual studio 2010 express for windows phone

i can not find, silverlight 4 template ? which mean, we still have to use visual studio express beta 2 ? (not release candidate)

can i have visual studio 2010 express for phone, and visual studio 2010 beta 2 installed together or is this not necessary ? maybe we can develop silverlight 4 on express for phone ?

sorry, im confused
Andrew

3/15/2010 11:13 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Updated:
Hi Tim, sorry i just read your previous post

Can u confirm this ?

We have to install 2 kind of visual studio and blend

Silverlight 4 development:
visual web 2010 express RC (not available yet, as 2 pm GMT+7)
Silverlight 4 SDK
expression blend 4 beta (This is trial, available to download)
Silverlight Toolkit for silverlight 4 (latest project release havent updated yet)

Windows 7 phone series
visual studio 2010 express for windows phone (available)
Phone SDK (available)
expression blend for phone (FREE, not yet available)

Is this summary correct ?
we have to install 2 "same" but different version ?
can we install this side by side ?

hope we have merged solution for this, even we express user

wish can build assembly easily changed, change project build,
from same project, target WPF/Silverlight/windows phone,
is there a way to do this ?

Sorry for the long post, but please help...
timheuer

3/15/2010 11:18 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Andrew -- sorry for the confusion. If you want Silverlight 4 development *AND* Windows Phone development tools you will need: VS2010 RC, SL4 Tools, Blend 4 beta, Windows Phone developer tools CTP.
Renaud

3/16/2010 12:32 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Tim,

Thanks for this, I just installed everything needed and it works like a charm. Nevertheless, I am disapointed about one thing : the emulator performance ! I have directX 11 and DDI 10 so it should work without being so slow ... Apparently, even if my GPU capabilities are alright, the emulator is run in software mode.

Is there any way to force to use the GPU ? It is so slow that I cannot even test my app with the emulator ;(

Great job anyway !
Vlad

3/16/2010 6:18 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Hi Tim,

I've noticed that IQueryable does not exist - are you guys going to include this in the future?

Vlad
Tom

3/16/2010 6:59 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Hi Tim,
How is Microsoft going to address the needs of the Enterprise and business customers? I heard that apps for Windows Phone 7 can only be sold and installed from Microsoft App store for Windows Phone 7 after being "certified" by Microsoft. What if developers in businesses want to create proprietary apps for their businesses? How will these apps be deployed to Windows Phone 7?
Ted

3/17/2010 7:40 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

what about clipboard? one of the most heralded features of Silverlight 4 is the new clipboard support, but Windows Phone 7 does not take advantage of this? In fact at Mix they said for sure there will be no clipboard at all on Windows Phone 7. What do you think of that?
Joseph

3/17/2010 2:27 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Any chance you could do a video for the simple people in the room on how to pass data between Phone pages (querystring, other methods?) and at what stages in the lifecycle that data can be accessed?
Miele

3/17/2010 11:39 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

This application is really amazing and i hope its users are increasing day to day. All the best for them. Thanks
kyle

3/18/2010 2:28 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Im with joseph, anyone have a tutorial on how to pass data or an object through to another Page? Coming from Blackberry I assumed that you could just pass it though to a constructor of the extended page type but i guess that isnt right, since i cant figure out how to display that page from calling something like PhoneScreen ps = new PhoneScreen(object data). Any suggestions or help would be great.
PeterNL

3/18/2010 9:34 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Hi Tim,

I haven't yet required enough inside knowledge on Windows Phone 7 development
to tackle the reason behind the painfully slow build -and deploytimez on one's developers machine. Any idea or suggestions on how to speed up this performance issue to enhance my developer productivity here? Thanks a lot! Promises to be a killer app in the upcoming mobile market (with the right amount of efficient working tools that is!).
Senthil Kumar

3/18/2010 10:35 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

I just started downloading the CTO . Hope to get started in few days
George

3/21/2010 2:03 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Hi Tim , I just wandered if WCF RIA Services can also be applied to and run on Windows Mobile 7 as being the Silverlight client. Is such a scenario possible?
timheuer

3/21/2010 7:59 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

George - WCF RIA Services pattern (i.e., client code-gen) is not yet available for WP7. You can use the WCF service of course, but not like you would in Silverlight (i.e., query pattern DomainContext, etc)
dawmail333

3/23/2010 12:05 AM | # Blend support

I can't seem to get Blend working with the given requirements. I get no 'Windows Phone' project templates, and trying to open one that already exists causes Blend to crash. I have Blend 4 beta and the requirements, so why won't it work?

Might it be because I'm running Win 7 x64?

Anyway, I'll be very thankful if you can help me here, all my other requests for help have fallen on deaf ears... =[
timheuer

3/23/2010 10:02 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Joseph (data change) -- take a look at the list application template for an idea of how DataContext is being used.
Nicholas Bedworth

3/23/2010 11:41 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Tim,

This is all very good news...

Questions:

1. What's the status of SAMI closed-captioning for Silverlight in general, and Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 Series?

2. And same question for the Indian character sets.

Believe it or not, we need both.
timheuer

3/23/2010 11:44 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Nicholas -- SAMI works now in Silverlight (desktop)

Indian character sets -- we're aware of all the needs and will continue to work toward our first iteration of WP7 platform.
Nicholas Bedworth

3/24/2010 10:22 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Tim,

Great! Thanks for the report. Silverlight is really becoming industrial strength and world-ready. Now that chrome-less windows are possible, we're ready for transparency :)

Nick
Craig Collins

3/26/2010 3:58 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Stupid Question….
I was really interest in what Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 had to offer, moving towards using SL for development on the phone is awesome.
But I do have one important question…. Can you browse to an existing Silverlight website on the phone…?
timheuer

3/29/2010 3:25 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Craig -- Silverlight in-browser is not supported in the first iteration of WP7 we have seen so far.
Kacey John

4/27/2010 2:33 AM | # H Miracle

One of the a lot of heralded appearance of Silverlight 4 is the new clipboard support, but Windows Phone 7 does not yield advantage of this? In actuality at Mix they said for abiding there will be no clipboard at all on Windows Phone 7.
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7/18/2010 2:47 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Yeah, it really give you an edge over the others, really love silverlight applications, thank you.
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7/18/2010 7:03 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

I just know if windows will come into the world of mobile phones

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Jeff Mattress

7/23/2010 4:14 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Silcerlight 4 promises to herald in a new era of interactive applications and I can't wait to see some of the new apps that appear!
Apple Tam

8/5/2010 1:33 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

I want to try silverlight if it has an edge to others. :D Hope I can grab one...

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H Miracle

8/5/2010 8:26 PM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Thanks for the list of videos, tips and tools - it is especially useful for me as I am just coming to grips with using Silverlight 4 for developing Windows Phone 7 apps.
Mark Little

8/23/2010 3:45 AM | # re: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Microsoft's hardware requirements stipulate that every handset must have a dedicated hardwired 'Bing Button' on the front panel.