Mobile phone development has exploded over the past few years and with the release of Windows Phone 7 there's a new mobile platform available that offers an extremely productive way to build applications and games. With Windows Phone 7 you can build Silverlight or XNA applications and take advantage of languages and tools you already know. In fact, if you're already familiar with Silverlight then you can instantly be productive building Windows Phone 7 applications since the same overall concepts apply.

If you’re interested in getting started with Silverlight development or enhancing your existing skills check out the upcoming Silverlight Firestarter event running December 2, 2010. The event can be attended live in Redmond, WA or viewed online (both for free). Sign-up for the event here. I’m excited about the opportunity to speak at the event along with Scott Guthrie, John Papa, Tim Heuer, Jesse Liberty, Jaime Rodriguez,  Yavor Georgiev and others.

I had the opportunity to give an online presentation today (download it here) for the LinkedIn .NET User Group (LIDNUG) about how the MVVM pattern can be integrated into Silverlight applications. Thanks to everyone who attended! MVVM is one of those topics that I really enjoy talking about since we use it everyday at my company with the applications we’re building for customers. It’s one of those patterns that can really promote code re-use, enhance testability and minimize maintenance once you jump into it and take the time to learn how it works.

Developing Silverlight applications has always been something I've enjoyed. I'm a big fan of the data binding engine that the framework provides and like the flexibility that XAML provides for building user interfaces. With all of the benefits Silverlight provides, the process of developing Silverlight applications hasn't always been as smooth as it could be especially if you relied solely on Visual Studio in the past. Silverlight 2 provided a read-only Visual Studio designer that didn't provide much in the way of functionality while Silverlight 3 only allowed XAML to be edited directly in the editor. Developers using Expression Blend weren't affected by Visual Studio designer limitations much while those without it ended up creating a lot of XAML by hand.