The Big Dummies Guide for Windows Phone Developer Resources
Windows Phone apps are growing in popularity as does the 50,000 60,000 apps in the marketplace today. Microsoft has done a great job at putting together some resources for developers including full documentation. When you first land on App Hub there’s all kind of samples, toolkits, and quick starts to get you going.
This post is to fill in some gaps and direct you to some additional resources that I’ve built up over the last couple of years of building phone apps. I won’t regurgitate the Microsoft resources here, you can get all of those at the App Hub itself. Instead these are other resources that will hopefully be useful.
Toolkits and Utilities
What you get out of the box is a lot but there is a lot more to offer out there that others have come up with. Here are a few.
Here’s a collection of utilities put together by the Dutch Windows Phone developer community. A lot of great small classes here that you can leverage in your app with some cool controls and new behaviours. It even has NuGet Support so adding it to your project is a no-brainer.
This is a nice little set of classes and while not as all-encompassing as others, does have a couple of killer things you must have on your phone. Namely an error reporting system (Little Watson) and a system to let users know of new versions and features. Must have!
I’m always writing code to call HttpRequest (or WebClient), download data from a site, deal with callbacks, then deal with updating my ViewModel. Agfx takes the heavy lifting out of a lot of this and tosses in free caching (with policies you specify like auto-refresh) making it a breeze. Highly recommended for any Windows Phone project that needs data.
Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone
This is from the Windows team and again, open source, providing you with a dozen or so controls including a frame system that lets your apps look and behave like the core ones, just with one line of code and a few lines of XAML markup on each page.
I’ve always had to write classes and plumbing code when dealing with tombstoning (saving the state of your app). This helper comes as a NuGet package that you can handle all your tombstoning needs with 1 line of code. Simple and easy.
We all hate writing the same boring get/set code for our MVVM properties. Enter this tool. It adds a custom MS Build task to your project and will take care of that for you. Now you just write POCO classes and the rest is handled for you. You're welcome.
Tired of writing about dialogs and screens? Install this (via NuGet of course!) and call it with one line of code. Viola. A complete A bout page with your own user definable pivots, license information, credits, etc. You can even load pages remotely and if there’s no network connection no problem, the library will handle it.
Another great about page, this one is driven from local resources and requires no coding, just configuration. I use this on some of my apps where I want to programatically hide/show sections of the above page (for example showing a "buy" button but only for trial apps). Nice!
Another useful library with a smattering of great controls, helpers, and converters. Drop in, use, profit (okay, the last part might take some work).
Silverlight apps on Windows Phone 7 greatly benefit from databinding and not the databinding you learned to hate in VB6. This is true, two-way databinding that lets you separate your concerns with your app correctly. MVVM Light is one library that helps do this (you can just use IPropertyNotify on your own classes) but provides other things like behaviours that can be bound to properties for eventing. Very useful.
Another MVVM library that works great with Windows Phone 7 (be sure to get the latest code, the NuGet package at the time of this writing didn’t support Mango and needs to be updated).
This is a great add-on that will help you deal with checking if the phone is in trial mode or not which will let you toggle different features or parts of the UI. An added feature is a simple toggle in your App.xaml file will let you put the app into Trial mode to test things out before sending to the marketplace. I packaged this up into a NuGet package so you can add it to any project quickly but check out the documentation on the project site as to how to use it (it's really easy).
Design
Design is a huge part of Windows Phone apps looking to capitalize on the Metro Design Language.
All kinds of icons and images go into just the basic Windows Phone app. Don't worry, it's not complex but it helps having a slick design. Look at getting one from any of the many low-price services out there (check out places like GraphicRiver for some people that would be more than happy to do some work for you). My first few apps I picked up some icons cheap ($5) from sites. Other places are creative commons licensed photos if you need them (make sure you include the proper credits in your About dialog). Microsoft has put together this page for you and while it won't make your app look awesome, it will tell you what graphics you need and where they're used.
This is a simple class that overlays a series of translucent boxes, all evenly spaced, on your app during debug time. It’s invaluable to check the lining up of those controls and titles. By Jeff Wilcox and the Windows Phone team.
31 Weeks of Windows Phone Design
The UX design team got into the habit of posting detailed articles on the Metro design language and it's nuances. It's a fascinating deep dive with a ton of great ideas around how the design of Metro apps works and provides some excellent insight into the design process that you can use in your apps.
Microsoft offers a design guide which is great but Jeff Wilcox turns it up to 11 with this post, covering all kinds of implementation tips developers should use before submitting an app.
Cheryl Simmons on the Windows Phone team has a great cheatsheet to follow here for all Windows Phone developers. Great tips on a variety of subjects.
Resources
Games for sure need music but nothing stopping you from putting original music into an app. Here are some royalty free resources you can use.
Hundreds of great looking Windows Phone icons you can use in your app, app bar, etc. all licensed under Creative Commons.
Development
Jeff Blanketburg took it upon himself to post 31 days of Windows Phone tips that covers all the basics you need to get going. Each post is deep on each topic and a recommended read to get into any of the core controls and features for building WP7 apps.
The last update for Windows Phone called Mango added all kinds of great new features like live tiles, search integration, running under lock screens, etc. Jeff comes back with 31 more days for Mango specific features.
MessageBox and Application Lifecycle
This can be tricky when you’re trying to not only pass certification but manage popups and screens. Here’s a post to help you through that.
Jesse Liberty, another huge name in the Windows Phone arena, has a whole set of tutorials focused on single tasks (currently over 30 of them). Great stuff and very useful!
Adam Nathan did the community a solid by creating 101 Windows Phone apps, then writing two books on it (there’s only enough room in a single book). Each app is detailed in a separate blog post on his site and covers various types of apps you would build with WP7 like stop watches, calendars, to do lists, and more.
Internationalization
Windows Phone is everywhere, not just English speaking nations!
A nice post on how your app can be more recognizable and (perhaps) popular in the Japanese markets. With Nokia phones hitting the marketplace, this tip is invaluable to reach out beyond your own backyard.
Globalization and Localization for your Phone
A great MSDN article (actually a series of them) that walks you through setting up localization for multiple languages. It’s easy and even if you only support one language, do this so all your strings are in a resource file and not hard coded for easy updates.
Achievements
If you’re building a game or even want to incorporate leaderboards and achievements into your phone app look no further.
This is a free and open source solution with a back-end server to keep track of your own user defined leaderboards and achievements. You define it on the site and with a few simple calls in your code, upload scores and award achievements to users and display global leaderboards in your app. Silverlight and XNA samples available to get you started.
Marketing
Building your app is just part of the process, then comes getting it out to the masses and keeping the word out.
Windows Phone 7 App Site Template
This is a complete one-page site template that’s completely data driven. You just make some modifications to the app name, provide some screenshots, deep links, etc. and you’re good to go. There’s even integrated Twitter and Uservoice support.
Adam Nathan puts together his own personal tips for submitting to the marketplace. Feel free to use this as a checklist. I do.
Training
No, this isn’t a link to some overpriced course. It’s a link to over 20 hours of free video training put together by Peter Kuhn. The videos include complete source code and walk through all the aspects of building Windows Phone apps from soup to nuts.
Tools
Tools are any part of a good developers kit and there’s no shortage of them for Windows Phone developers.
Think of it as Firebug for your phone. Why are you still reading this?
Wondering if you’re writing the right thing to your phone or want to take a look at where things are going in your app? This tool lets you peek inside the storage system for you.
This is an awesome tool and installs with ClickOnce so you always have the latest version. It lets you take screenshots effortlessly with or without an emulator skin so you can do cool shots for your blog and take the final images for the marketplace.
Bored with the out of the box emulator every time you launch it from Visual Studio? This tool let’s you change up the skin to something more sexy and fun, all with the click of a button. Be the cool kid at your next Windows Phone presentation and amaze your friends!
Monetization
Microsoft Advertising Services
Microsoft has continued to expand it’s monetization services by offering up ads in new markets (and markets are being added regularily). Various reports have different successes with these services but they’re baked into the Mango SDK and easy to setup and use.
This is by far a complete list so please leave a comment with more links, suggestions, and corrections as you see them. I’ll update the post as quickly as I can.
Now, go get building your first Windows Phone app!