Gang, we’re done! 24 chapters, about 1,000 pages. Congratulations to Charles, who has outdone himself!

Speaking for Charles and for the Windows Phone 7 team, we hope that you will enjoy Programming Windows Phone 7:

You can download a PDF here (38.6 MB).

And you can download the ebook’s sample code here (5.03 MB).

To give you a sense of this offering, here is Charles’s Introduction—beneath that you’ll find the ebook’s full Table of Contents:

Introduction

This book is a gift from the Windows Phone 7 team at Microsoft to the programming community, and I am proud to have been a part of it. Within the pages that follow, I show you the basics of writing applications for Windows Phone 7 using the C# programming language with the Silverlight and XNA 2D frameworks.

Yes, Programming Windows Phone 7 is truly a free download, but for those readers who still love paper—as I certainly do—this book will also be available (for sale) divided into two fully-indexed print editions: Microsoft Silverlight Programming for Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft XNA Framework Programming for Windows Phone 7. [Note from Devon: we should have these ready for order in December 2010.]

With the money you’ve saved downloading this book, please buy other books. Despite the plethora of information available online, books are still the best way to learn about programming within a coherent and cohesive tutorial narrative. Every book sale brings a tear of joy to an author’s eye, so please help make them weep overflowing rivers.

In particular, you might want to buy other books to supplement the material in this book. For example, I barely mention Web services in this book, and that’s a serious deficiency because Web services are likely to become increasingly important in Windows Phone 7 applications. My coverage of XNA is limited to 2D graphics and while I hope to add several 3D chapters in the next edition of this book, I don’t really get into the whole Xbox LIVE community aspect of game development. Nor do I discuss any programming tools beyond Visual Studio—not even Expression Blend.

My publisher Microsoft Press has a couple additional Windows Phone 7 books coming soon: Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Development Step by Step by Andy Wigley & Peter Foot offers a more tools-oriented approach. Although Michael Stroh’s Windows Phone 7 Plain & Simple is a guide to using the phone rather than developing for it, I suspect it will give developers some insights and ideas.

Moreover, I also hear that my old friend Doug Boling is working hard on a Windows Phone 7 enterprise-programming book that is likely to be considered his masterpiece. Be sure to check out that one.

Organization

This book is divided into three parts. The first part discusses basic concepts of Windows Phone 7 programming using example programs that target both Silverlight and the XNA framework. It is likely that many Windows Phone 7 developers will choose either one platform or the other, but I think it’s important for all developers who have at least a little knowledge of the alternative to their chosen path.

The second part of this book focuses entirely on Silverlight, and the third part on XNA 2D. For your convenience, the chapters in each part build upon previous knowledge in a progressive tutorial narrative, and hence are intended to be read sequentially.

My Assumptions About You

I assume that you know the basic principles of .NET programming and you have a working familiarity with the C# programming language. If not, you might benefit from reading my free online book .NET Book Zero: What the C or C++ Programmer Needs to Know about C# and the .NET Framework, available from my website at www.charlespetzold.com/dotnet.

System Requirements

To use this book properly you’ll need to download and install the Windows Phone Developer Tools, which includes Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, XNA Game Studio 4.0, and an on-screen Windows Phone Emulator to test your programs in the absence of an actual device. Get the latest information and downloads at http://developer.windowsphone.com.

You can install these tools on top of Visual Studio 2010, in effect enhancing Visual Studio 2010 for phone development. That’s the configuration I used.

Although you can do quite a bit with the phone emulator, at some point you’ll want to deploy your programs to an actual Windows Phone 7 device. You can register as a phone developer at http://developer.windowsphone.com and then have the ability to unlock your phone so you can deploy your programs from Visual Studio.

Since late July 2010, I’ve had an LG GW910 phone to test the programs in this book. For the record, the final build I installed was 7.0.7003.0.

Using the Phone Emulator

Windows Phone 7 supports multi-touch, and working with multi-touch is an important part of developing programs for the phone. When using the Windows Phone Emulator, mouse clicks and mouse movement on the PC can mimic touch on the emulator, but for only one finger. You can test out multi-touch for real on the phone emulator if you have a multi-touch monitor running under Windows 7.

In the absence of a multi-touch monitor, you might want to explore simulating multi-touch with multiple mouse devices. The site http://multitouchvista.codeplex.com has the download you’ll need and includes a link to http://michaelsync.net/2010/04/06/step-by-step-tutorial-installing-multi-touch-simulator-for-silverlight-phone-7 that provides instructions.

Windows Phone 7 devices also have a built-in accelerometer, which can be very difficult to simulate in an emulator. Per Blomqvist, the Technical Reviewer for this book, found an application at http://accelkit.codeplex.com that utilizes the webcam and ARToolkit to emulate the accelerometer sensor and feed that data into the Windows Phone 7 emulator through a TCP/HTTP Server, and although neither of us have tried it out, it sounds quite intriguing.

Code Samples

To illustrate Silverlight and XNA programming concepts, this book describes about 190 complete programs. Many of them are small and simple, but others are larger and more interesting.

Some people like to learn new programming environments by re-creating the projects in Visual Studio and typing in the source code themselves from the pages of the book. Others prefer to study the code and run the pre-existing programs to see what the code does. If you fall into the latter category, you can download all the source code in a ZIP file. The location of this ZIP file is available from my website at www.charlespetzold.com/phone and from the Microsoft Press blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/.

If you find something in the code that is useful in your own software project, feel free to use the code without restriction—either straight up or modified in whatever way you want. That’s what it’s there for.

Last-Minute Items

As I was nearing the completion this book, the first version of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit was released with some additional elements and controls, and is available for downloading at http://silverlight.codeplex.com. Historically, these Silverlight toolkits very often contain previews of elements and controls that are incorporated into later Silverlight releases. I regret that I could not include a discussion of the toolkit contents in the appropriate chapters of this book.

With XNA programs, sometimes Visual Studio complains that it can’t build or deploy the program. If you encounter that problem, in the Solution Platforms drop-down list on the standard toolbar, select “Windows Phone” rather than “Any CPU”. Or, invoke the Configuration Manager from the Build menu, and in the Active Solution Platform drop-down select “Windows Phone” rather than “Any CPU”.

The www.charlespetzold.com/phone page on my website will contain information about this book and perhaps even some information about a future edition. I also hope to blog about Windows Phone 7 programming as much as possible.

The Essential People

This book owes its existence to Dave Edson—an old friend from the early 1990s era of Microsoft Systems Journal—who had the brilliant idea that I would be the perfect person to write a tutorial on Windows Phone 7. Dave arranged for me to attend a technical deep dive on the phone at Microsoft in December 2009, and I was hooked. Todd Brix gave the thumbs up on the book, and Anand Iyer coordinated the project with Microsoft Press.

At Microsoft Press, Ben Ryan launched the project and Devon Musgrave had the unenviable job of trying to make my code and prose resemble an actual book. (We all go way back: You’ll see Ben and Devon’s names on the bottom of the copyright page of Programming Windows, fifth edition, published in 1998.)

My Technical Reviewer was the diligent Per Blomqvist, who apparently tested all the code in both the sample files and as the listings appear in the book, and who in the process caught several errors on my part that were truly, well, shocking.

Dave Edson also reviewed some chapters and served as conduit to the Windows Phone team to deal with my technical problems and questions. Early on, Aaron Stebner provided essential guidance; Michael Klucher reviewed chapters, and Kirti Deshpande, Charlie Kindel, Casey McGee, and Shawn Oster also had important things to tell me. Thanks to Bonnie Lehenbauer for reviewing a chapter.

I am also indebted to Shawn Hargreaves for his XNA expertise, and Yochay Kiriaty and Richard Bailey for the lowdown on tombstoning.

My wife Deirdre Sinnott has been a marvel of patience and tolerance over the past months as she dealt with an author given to sudden mood swings, insane yelling at the computer screen, and the conviction that the difficulty of writing a book relieves one of the responsibility of performing basic household chores.

Alas, I can’t blame any of them for bugs or other problems that remain in this book. Those are all mine.

Charles Petzold
New York City and Roscoe, New York
October 22, 2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I   The Basics

1   Hello, Windows Phone 7

Targeting Windows Phone 7

The Hardware Chassis

Sensors and Services

File | New | Project

A First Silverlight Phone Program

The Standard Silverlight Files

Color Themes

Points and Pixels

The XAP is a ZIP

An XNA Program for the Phone

2   Getting Oriented

Silverlight and Dynamic Layout

Orientation Events

XNA Orientation

Simple Clocks (Very Simple Clocks)

3   An Introduction to Touch

Low-Level Touch Handling in XNA

The XNA Gesture Interface

Low-Level Touch Events in Silverlight

The Manipulation Events

Routed Events

Some Odd Behavior?

4   Bitmaps, Also Known as Textures

XNA Texture Drawing

The Silverlight Image Element

Images Via the Web

Image and ImageSource

Loading Local Bitmaps from Code

Capturing from the Camera

The Phone’s Photo Library

5   Sensors and Services

Accelerometer

A Simple Bubble Level

Geographic Location

Using a Map Service

6   Issues in Application Architecture

Basic Navigation

Passing Data to Pages

Sharing Data Among Pages

Retaining Data across Instances

The Multitasking Ideal

Task Switching on the Phone

Page State

Isolated Storage

XNA Tombstoning and Settings

Testing and Experimentation

Part II   Silverlight

7   XAML Power and Limitations

A TextBlock in Code

Property Inheritance

Property-Element Syntax

Colors and Brushes

Content and Content Properties

The Resources Collection

Sharing Brushes

x:Key and x:Name

An Introduction to Styles

Style Inheritance

Themes

Gradient Accents

8   Elements and Properties

Basic Shapes

Transforms

Animating at the Speed of Video

Handling Manipulation Events

The Border Element

TextBlock Properties and Inlines

More on Images

Playing Movies

Modes of Opacity

Non-Tiled Tile Brushes

9   The Intricacies of Layout

The Single-Cell Grid

The StackPanel Stack

Text Concatenation with StackPanel

Nested Panels

Visibility and Layout

Two ScrollViewer Applications

The Mechanism of Layout

Inside the Panel

A Single-Cell Grid Clone

A Custom Vertical StackPanel

The Retro Canvas

Canvas and ZIndex

The Canvas and Touch

The Mighty Grid

10   The App Bar and Controls

ApplicationBar Icons

Jot and Application Settings

Jot and Touch

Jot and the ApplicationBar

Elements and Controls

RangeBase and Slider

The Basic Button

The Concept of Content

Theme Styles and Precedence

The Button Hierarchy

Toggling a Stopwatch

Buttons and Styles

TextBox and Keyboard Input

11   Dependency Properties

The Problem Illustrated

The Dependency Property Difference

Deriving from UserControl

A New Type of Toggle

Panels with Properties

Attached Properties

12   Data Bindings

Source and Target

Target and Mode

Binding Converters

Relative Source

The “this” Source

Notification Mechanisms

A Simple Binding Server

Setting the DataContext

Simple Decision Making

Converters with Properties

Give and Take

TextBox Binding Updates

13   Vector Graphics

The Shapes Library

Canvas and Grid

Overlapping and ZIndex

Polylines and Custom Curves

Caps, Joins, and Dashes

Polygon and Fill

The Stretch Property

Dynamic Polygons

The Path Element

Geometries and Transforms

Grouping Geometries

The Versatile PathGeometry

The ArcSegment

Bézier Curves

The Path Markup Syntax

How This Chapter Was Created

14   Raster Graphics

The Bitmap Class Hierarchy

WriteableBitmap and UIElement

The Pixel Bits

Vector Graphics on a Bitmap

Images and Tombstoning

Saving to the Picture Library

Becoming a Photo Extras Application

15   Animations

Frame-Based vs. Time-Based

Animation Targets

Click and Spin

Some Variations

XAML-Based Animations

A Cautionary Tale

Key Frame Animations

Trigger on Loaded

Animating Attached Properties (or Not)

Splines and Key Frames

The Bouncing Ball Problem

The Easing Functions

Animating Perspective Transforms

Animations and Property Precedence

16   The Two Templates

ContentControl and DataTemplate

Examining the Visual Tree

ControlTemplate Basics

The Visual State Manager

Sharing and Reusing Styles and Templates

Custom Controls in a Library

Variations on the Slider

The Ever-Handy Thumb

Custom Controls

17   Items Controls

Items Controls and Visual Trees

Customizing Item Displays

ListBox Selection

Binding to ItemsSource

Databases and Business Objects

Fun with DataTemplates

Sorting

Changing the Panel

The DataTemplate Bar Chart

A Card File Metaphor

18   Pivot and Panorama

Compare and Contrast

Music by Composer

The XNA Connection

The XNA Music Classes: MediaLibrary

Displaying the Albums

The XNA Music Classes: MediaPlayer

Part III   XNA

19   Principles of Movement

The Naïve Approach

A Brief Review of Vectors

Moving Sprites with Vectors

Working with Parametric Equations

Fiddling with the Transfer Function

Scaling the Text

Two Text Rotation Programs

20   Textures and Sprites

The Draw Variants

Another Hello Program?

Driving Around the Block

Movement Along a Polyline

The Elliptical Course

A Generalized Curve Solution

21   Dynamic Textures

The Render Target

Preserving Render Target Contents

Drawing Lines

Manipulating the Pixel Bits

The Geometry of Line Drawing

Modifying Existing Images

22   From Gestures to Transforms

Gestures and Properties

Scale and Rotate

Matrix Transforms

The Pinch Gesture

Flick and Inertia

The Mandelbrot Set

Pan and Zoom

Game Components

Affine and Non-Affine Transforms

23   Touch and Play

More Game Components

The PhingerPaint Canvas

A Little Tour Through SpinPaint

The SpinPaint Code

The Actual Drawing

PhreeCell and a Deck of Cards

The Playing Field

Play and Replay

24   Tilt and Play

3D Vectors

A Better Bubble Visualization

The Graphical Rendition

Follow the Rolling Ball

Navigating a Maze