Programming Articles

In Part 1 of this article you learned how to work with orientation changes on the Windows Phone and how to create horizontally scrolling pages using Panorama and Pivot pages. In Part 2 you'll see how to interact with some of the built-in applications on the phone through the use of the Launcher and Chooser applications.

Developing for Windows Phone is easy if you have been doing any XAML at all. That's because you use Silverlight for Windows Phone development. This is a great thing because everything you already know can be applied immediately. This is not to say that there are no new things that you will have to learn. In fact, with the reduced screen size, the ability to change the orientation of the phone and some of the new types of pages, there are actually quite a few things you will need to learn. This article and the next one is your introduction to some of these new UI techniques.

By the time you read this, the Windows Phone 7 devices will be widely available on the market. Many developers are thinking about developing for this phone. If you are thinking about it, then I suggest you do more than think and start developing! This is a whole new opportunity and a whole new market available to you as a .NET developer that you have not had before. If you held off on developing mobile applications because of the learning curve of iPhone or Android programming, then this is your chance, as you will use Silverlight and .NET to program the Windows Phone. In this short article, I will introduce you to the basics of Windows Phone and give you some reasons why you will want to develop using this important new technology.