Platforms & Tools
Windows® Phone 7 is a new platform bringing together developers from the .NET, Silverlight, and XNA eco-systems. This document combines reference information and tips for developing and publishing a Silverlight application for the platform using Visual Studio.
Hardware Specification
All initially launched Windows Phone 7 devices come with: the same operating system; the same minimum set of builtin applications and platform capabilities; and the ability to run Silverlight and XNA applications. Additionally, all devices come with the following hardware capabilities:
- 480x800 display
- DirectX 9 hardware acceleration
- Capacitive 4-point multi-touch
- Back, Start & Search hardware buttons (as well as a power, camera and volume button)
- A-GPS, accelerometer, compass*, light*, proximity*
- 5 MP+ digital camera with flash
- 256MB+ RAM
- 8GB+ flash storage
- * not accesible from .NET API in initial release
Hardware manufacturers may differentiate their devices by items such as: having higher RAM, flash storage or camera mega-pixels; having different screen sizes (but same resolution); adding a slide-out keyboard (horizontal or vertical); adding a single additional theme accent color; bundling additional built-in applications—but not removing/ replacing built-in applications/UI.
Flash storage space should be considered as opaque file system storage; it is not removable portable storage for transferring files. It can be extended in some devices with an additional card, but that requires a ‘factory reset’ of the device to wipie existing data.
Developer Tools
The developer tools for Windows Phone 7 are available for free. Go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=189554 for the RTW (‘Released to the Web’) tools or go to http://create.msdn.com to find the latest set.
The developer tools include the following items in one package:
- Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone*
- XNA Game Studio 4.0*
- Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone*
- Windows Phone Emulator Resources
- Silverlight 4 Tools For Visual Studio
- *Items 1 & 2 will install as standalone applications if Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher is not installed, otherwise they will install additional project templates in Visual Studio. The same goes for item 3 with regard to Expression Blend 4.
To install the RTW version of the tools, one of the following is required:
- Windows® Vista® (x86 and x64) with Service Pack 2–all editions except Starter Edition
- Windows® 7 (x86 and x64)–all editions except Starter Edition
Be sure to check out the release notes for full requirements. http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=190374
Before installing the RTW version of the tools, be sure to uninstall any pre-release version of the toolset in one step by uninstalling the item named, “Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools...” under Control Panel.
Silverlight Application Platform
The Windows Phone 7 platform can run applications based on Silverlight and XNA.
Silverlight is often the preferred choice for applications built with controls and events, similar to WinForms or WebForms. XNA is typically used for higher performance UI hardware rendering in 2D and 3D.
Silverlight applications can use non-rendering classes provided by the XNA framework (e.g. for playing overlapping sounds or accessing microphone audio) and vice-versa. For choosing a development stack and calling across frameworks, see < href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/enus/ library/ff402528(v=VS.92).aspx">http://msdn.microsoft.com/enus/ library/ff402528(v=VS.92).aspx.
Silverlight applications run directly on the Windows Phone platform in a mode similar to the out-of-browser capability of Silverlight 3+ on the desktop. They do not run in a browser. In fact, Silverlight content on Web pages will not appear in the phone’s Web browser, but there is a WebBrowser control to host HTML content (from the Web, injected, or from local storage) inside a Silverlight application.
The RTW Silverlight platform is based largely on Silverlight 3.
A notable Silverlight 3 feature that is missing is TCP socket network access. A notable Silverlight 4 feature that is included is multi-touch manipulation events and offline DRM.
For general information on Silverlight support on the phone, see the MSDN library section: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff426934(v=VS.95).aspx
To see the extent to which a specific Silverlight class is supported on Windows Phone, check out any of the class pages within the namespace under .NET Class library for Silverlight (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ cc838194(v=vs.95).aspx) and look for the symbol next to class members.
The phone platform includes a set of classes specific to Windows Phone: <"http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ ff626516(v=VS.92).aspx.">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff626516(v=VS.92).aspx.
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