Building Your First Windows Phone 7 Application (part 1) - Creating a Windows Phone Project

Preparing Your Development Machine

At the time of writing this book, Windows Phone 7 developer tool beta version 1.0 was used. The latest Windows Phone developer tool can be downloaded from http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7/. The Windows Phone developer beta tools (vm_web.exe) will install the following:

• Any commercial version of Visual Studio 2010 or free version of Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone: Programmer's development IDE.

• Windows Phone emulator: Used to run and test the Windows Phone application.

• Silverlight for Windows Phone: Silverlight Framework for Windows Phone based on Silverlight 3 technology.

• Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone: Can be used to design user interfaces.

• XNA Game Studio 4: Tools for developing games.

In this section, you'll build a simple "HelloWorld" application using Silverlight framework. Creating the application will provide you with an opportunity to use Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, the Windows Phone 7 Emulator, and some Windows Phone Silverlight controls.

1. Creating a Windows Phone Project

To get started, you first fire up Visual Studio Express 2010 and create a project.

1. To launch Visual Studio 2010 Express, select Windows Start => All Programs =>Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express => Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone.

2. Create a new project by selecting File => New => Project on the Visual Studio menu, as shown in Figure 1.

   Figure 1. Creating a new project

   

3. From among the three C# templates that Visual Studio displays on its New Project dialog page, select the Windows Phone Application Visual C# template, as shown in Figure 2.

   NOTE

   There are three different Windows Phone Visual Studio project templates. The Windows Phone Application template is a template for one-page applications. The Windows Phone List Application template uses ListBox control and page navigation framework to create applications with multiple pages. The Windows Phone Class Library template can be used to create a class library that can be referenced by other Windows Phone projects.

4. For the purposes of this exercise, change the Name of the new project to "HelloWorld," by changing the text in the Name box, as shown in Figure 2. Also you can change the location where the project will be saved by changing the path in the Location box.

   Figure 2. Creating a new Silverlight Windows Phone application

   

5. Finally, select OK on the New Project dialog, and Visual Studio 2010 will build your project, whose elements are displayed in Figure 3.

Figure 3. HelloWorld Silverlight Windows Phone project

By default two TextBlock controls will be placed in Windows Phone, and you can see this in design view on the far left in Figure 3.

With a phone project ready to roll, it's time to bring the application to life by adding some functionality and creating a user interface. We'll start with the interface, adding some controls to its blank design surface for users to press and in which the application can display text.