Month: December 2010

Want to know what Windows Phone 7 devices are being offered by Canadian telcos? I’ve got the list below:

Telus

Telus offers two Windows Phones:

• HTC 7 Surround. This is the one with the slide-out Dolby Surround speakers and a little kickstand so you can use it as a mini video player. The speakers are surprisingly loud and clear and our coworker Anthony “The Mobile Situation” Bartolo used them to great effect at TechDays this year, annoying us with the Jersey Shore soundtrack.
• LG Optimus 7. This one’s for people with DLNA-equipped TVs (or in a pinch, a TV with an Xbox hooked up to it) – you can use DLNA to send the pictures and videos on your phone to a nice large screen. It’s great for presentations, vacations slides or even movie-watching.

Bell

There are a number of people who refuse to use on-screen virtual keyboards and like the reassuring feel of a button’s “throw”. If you’re one of these people, Bell’s LG Optimus Quantum is the Windows Phone for you, with a slide-out keyboard. I’ve taken it out for a test drive at the store and it feels pretty nice.

Rogers

I’m on Rogers (as are all Microsoft employees in Ontario – the company pays for our phones and plans), and their Windows Phone is the Samsung Focus. It’s sexy, skinny, much lighter than you’d expect for a device with this kind of horsepower and it sports a bright, crisp 4” Super AMOLED screen, just like the one on the Galaxy S. I end up doing a lot of impromptu demos with this phone, and everyone walks away impressed.

Expansys

If you’re in the market for an unlocked WP7 phone, or perhaps a WP7 phone that the Canadian telcos aren’t carrying, Expansys are the go-to people. If you’ve been to one of the big Microsoft conferences in the US – PDC, TechEd North America and so on – you’ve probably seen their booth. They’re the go-to guys for all sorts of mobile devices, including the hard-to-get ones.

They have a Canadian site, www.expansys.ca, and they’ve got a very extensive selection of Windows Phone 7 devices. Better still, their service is great. When I screwed up my last order and accidentally ordered the European version of a phone that wouldn’t be compatible with HSPA+ over here, a quick email to their service was all it took for them to fix the problem and let me know it was fixed. I salute them with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This book’s so new that I’m not sure the dead-tree version is available yet: it’s Windows Phone 7 Game Development, published by Apress and written by Adam Dawes. I’ve just purchased the ebook version (which you can download right away for USD$34.99), so I’ve only had a chance to do a quick skim.

According to Apress’ site, here’s what you’ll learn from Windows Phone 7 Game Development:

• How to get started with Windows Phone 7 development, from setting up the IDE to debugging techniques.
• Develop using the free or full versions of Visual Studio 2010.
• Master high performance 2D and 3D graphics using the XNA development environment.
• Build 2D games using Silverlight and also learn how to publish them to the web.
• Find out the best ways to control your games, including using touch screens, keyboards and accelerometers.
• Produce high quality music and sound effects from your games.
• Masses of example code and working projects, including two example games, "Cosmic Rocks" and "Diamond Lines."
• All you need to release your games to the world for fun or to sell.

It looks like a worthy partner to Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’ve been flipping through Apress’ new book, Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development, and I’ve been impressed so far. As with most books on developing for any given platform, the first couple of chapters are introductory and have the mandatory “Get the Tools” and “Let’s Write a Hello World Program” sections, but the book veers from the standard trajectory in chapter 3 by diving right into the use of the cloud for data storage for your app.

That’s where we get into the serious stuff: the MVVM design pattern, setting up a SQL Azure account and database, creating a cloud service to access that cloud database, building a WCF service to access the data, and then building a Windows Phone app – a notepad application – that accesses that database. By the end of the chapter – and remember, this is chapter three and less than a hundred pages in – you’ve got a cloud-enabled phone app that you can use as the basis for your own. That’s no small feat, and it’s a testament to the tools and technologies available to Windows Phone 7 developers.

Update (Friday, Dec. 17, 2010): Author Henry Lee let us know in the comments that there’s an update to chapter 3 to cover recent changes to Azure’s UI.

I’m still working my way through Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development, but from what I’ve seen so far and from casual scans ahead, I would recommend it for the developer who’s comfortable with C# and .NET and is ready to pick up a lot of new things quickly.

If you’d like to get this book as quickly as possible, I’d recommend the ebook version. It’s also the cheapest, at USD$27.99. Better still, if you buy before midnight of December 31st, you can save 25% by using the promotional code APRESSHOLIDAY2010, knocking the price down to a mere USD$21 (which as of this writing, is a Rush-inspired CDN$21.12).

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.