Windows Phone 7 Series leverages Silverlight and the XNA gaming platform for application development. Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend are positioned, respectively, as development and design tools for the phone OS, which features graphical capabilities related to the Apple iPhone.
Building Your Environment
Developers can download a single install from the Windows Phone Developer Portal that provides everything necessary to build, validate, and publish Windows Phone applications. This includes the necessary components for Visual Studio Express 2010 and the Silverlight environment and XNA Framework needed to build applications or games for Windows Phone 7.
Expression Blend Add in for Windows Phone 7 is also a necessary environment component. This add-in allows you to view the design area in blend Simulated as if you are designing on the hardware phone. It also restricts the use of certain components so you will not build incompatible apps for the platform by using controls that are not supported. The necessary components for using Blend when building Windows Phone 7 apps are:
• Expression Blend 4 Release Candidate (RC) (Expression Blend 4 RC can be installed side by side with Expression Blend 3)
• Windows Phone Developer Tools
• Microsoft Expression Blend Add-in Preview 2 for Windows Phone
• Microsoft Expression Blend Software Development Kit Preview 2 for Windows Phone
Phone Application features
Silverlight Applications features for Windows Phone support core Silverlight capabilities managed in .NET and XAML including: High quality video and audio using a wide range of codecs, DRM and IIS Smooth Streaming , Deep Zoom for enhanced reading and photo browsing experiences and Vector and Bitmap Graphics and animation.
On top of those features are the abilities of the hardware that extend the application’s interactivity:
• Hardware acceleration for video and graphics
• Accelerometer for motion sensing
• Multi-touch
• Camera and microphone
• Location awareness
• Push notifications
• Native phone functionality
Silverlight can also interact with the XNA framework built into the Windows Phone 7 platform allowing for 3d games and textures when building your applications. To create XNA games for Windows Phone 7 you will need to download and install the XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP.