Windows Phone Gaming and Rich apps

paulfo — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:29:00 GMT

Shout it from the roof tops Windows Phone 7 Series application development uses Silverlight and XNA!!

If you’re a .Net developers today – you just became a Windows Phone developer, able to deliver rich applications with Silverlight and amazing games with XNA.

Charlie Kindel summarises the latest Windows Phone 7 Series announcements on his blog post here. The Twitter Q&A from the announcement is here.

Most frequently asked questions:

Windows Phone 7 Series is not backwards compatible to Windows Mobile
Microsoft will continue to support Windows Mobile 6.5 for some time to come, including new devices on 6.5 and 6.5.3
Your Xbox Avatar will be in 2D on the WP7S
There are no plans to upgrade the HTC HD2 to WP7 OS.

So there you have it. At Mix (15th/16th March) we will go into the developer tools offering and show you have to build awesome games in XNA and glorious applications in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 Series. There are 12 sessions at Mix.

To start ramping your skills in these technologies now look at this post.

Other key Microsoft bloggers on these topics include:

Andre Vrignaud: www.ozymandias.com / @ozymandias

Christian Schormann: electricbeach.org / @ cschormann

Shawn Hargreaves: blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar / @shawnhargreaves

Todd Brix: windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone / @toddbrix

Anand Iyer: www.artificialignorance.net/blog / @ai

Michael Klucher: klucher.com / @mklucher

Ramping dev skills for Windows Phone 7 Series

paulfo — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:27:00 GMT

So you now really want to learn Silverlight and XNA to be ready to build applications for the coolest new phone on the block?

Here is a list of resources to get you going:

XNA:

Setting up XNA Games Studio on your machine. You can install the current version of XNA on your Windows PC today. This isn’t the Windows Phone 7 Series compatible version but it does allow you to learn XNA by building applications for Windows and Xbox 360 (it supports Zune too but I’ll assume you don’t have a device to run your apps on).
Build a 2D or 3D game in one hour. So you know have XNA running on your PC – lets build a game!
Building out a simple platformer game. This series of blog posts take you through building out a platformer game and show you just how straight forward the XNA architecture is.
Adding vertical scrolling to the platformer game
Adding player lives to the platformer game
Adding game state management
Creating new graphics
The enhanced platformer game
More reading. There are loads of XNA resources out there go bing them!

Websites:

Books:

Silverlight:

Read all about it and see some great examples of Silverlight. Silverlight development is currently supporting in the Visual Studio developer tools and Expression designer tools products. 60 day trials of these products are freely available from the links.
Get started with Silverlight. Starter kit videos
Learn how to use Expression Blend to build Silverlight applications.
More reading. There are loads of Silverlight resources out there go bing them!

Websites:

Books:

Search results matching tags 'xna', 'Silverlight', 'Paul Foster', 'Programming', and 'wotudo'

Windows Phone Gaming and Rich apps

Ramping dev skills for Windows Phone 7 Series