As you’re probably aware, Microsoft is finally going to attempt to enter the Smart Phone OS market with it’s new Windows Phone 7 operating system /platform / ecosystem. It’s going to have a hard time getting started (Android and particularly the iPhone OS have a gigantic lead and devoted user-base), but I think it has a good chance. Looking at some of the reviews of the hardware and it’s performance with the new OS, things are looking promising for the big M, if that is, they can pull off the marketing and get enough hardware vendors on-board.

One of the things Microsoft will be hoping on is a massive uptake of application developers, and to try and encourage that they’ve released and helped circulate a bunch of things to the community! This post hopes to point to some of the articles, videos, blogs and other sites by both Microsoft and others to help you learn and get started with WP7.

Obviously, before you get started, you want to download the various developer tools. They are currently in Beta and downloadable here. It’s been announced that the full non-Beta set of tools on the 16 September 2010. The tools are free – the only bit you pay for is a subscription that allows you to post applications to the Marketplace. That’s currently being listed as £67 GBP

Links:

• Windows Phone 7 Developer Blog – very useful for keeping up to date with the releases and anything other major happening for the platform.
• Windows Phone 7 Developer Portal (developer.windowsphone.com) – another good site for finding videos and other related training materials.
• Promotional website for consumers appears to be at Microsoft/WindowsPhone.
• Scott Hanselman’s “Walkthrough of the Developer Phone” shows some of features of the phone after getting one of the preview devices.
• Detailed review from Engadget.com on a Samsung device using Windows Phone 7 – very promising outcome, marred only by a few minor let downs (basically, the absence of Multi-tasking and Cut-and-Paste).

Videos & Labs

• Hello Windows Phone 7! the obligatory “Hello World!” application.
• Microsoft’s Channel 9 has a great series hosted by Andy Wigley and Rob Miles called “Jump Start“. If you like video tutorials and talk through’s, this is a great starting point. There are some resources available for download as well to help you along the way. As far as things go, I can’t recommend this enough. It’s a great set of tutorials that seems to cover a wide area of the platform without going into great amounts of detail about each bit, choosing (wisely) to only wiz along the surface. All the videos are downloadable in a number of formats, including the useful MP4 for sticking on your iPhone (until such a time as you can get your mits on a Windows Phone 7 device of course!):
  1. Introduction
  2. Building a Silverlight Application (Part 1)
  3. Building a Silverlight Application (Part 2)
  4. Building Games for the Windows Phone 7 Platform
  5. Building XNA Games for the Windows Phone 7 Platform (Part 1)
  6. Building XNA Games for the Windows Phone 7 Platform (Part 2)
  7. Advanced Application Development (Part 1)
  8. Advanced Application Development (Part 2)
  9. Advanced Application Development (Part 3)
  10. Marketing Your Windows Phone 7 Application
  11. Working With Media
  12. Final Silverlight Topics and Wrap-up
• Windows Phone 7 Developer Training Kit – a bunch of labs and tutorials, maybe not as good as the Jump Start stuff, but still good and varied enough to give you a nice overview of all the features
• Coding 4 Fun: Building a “Shuffleboard” application using Silverlight
• MSDev.com has a bucket full of bitesize videos in a collection named “Windows Phone 7 in 7 Minutes“

More resources:

• Creating High Performance Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone
• Application Bar Icons for Windows Phone 7 – a bunch of useful icon’s that you may want to use in your application.
• UI Design and Interaction Guide
• Again, Scott Hanselman, this time on his great Hanselminute’s Podcast he covers Silverlight performance on Windows Phone 7
• Panorama & Pivot are coming soon, more information is available from Jeff Wilcox.
• With the absence of SQL on the Windows Phone 7 (at least initially), there is a market for some free libraries to make relational data management considerably easier. So far, two of the better ones are Sterling and Perst