Microsoft's Mike Ormond has gone ahead and finally published a nice eBook called "Building Windows Phone Apps: A Developer's Guide", which looks to give a "puddy up" "into developing on the platform and, importantly, helps you to avoid making the same mistakes others have made".
The book was done as a collaboration between various volunteers in the community, including Colin Eberhardt, Pete Vickers, Andy Gore, Mike Hole, Gergely Orosz, Sasha Kotlyar, Dominic Betts, Will Johnson, Ben Cameron, James Bearne, Samidip Basu, Paul Marsh, Stuart Lodge and looks to be dynamic, with new chapters added over time.
"The plan was always to publish an initial set of chapters and then iterate, adding new chapters and updating / refining existing chapters as we went."
Seems like a good resource for devs out there and seeing as it is free, there's little reason to not grab it. More info can be found on Mke Ormond's blog here. Thanks, Aleksandr (Sasha) K., for the tip!
Reader comments
Building Windows Phone Apps: A Developer’s Guide [eBook, Developers]
Downloaded and skimmed. I've been hitting wp7 dev docs and apphub pretty hard this week to come up to speed on wp7 and so all new info is welcome. I guess as an overview it's all right, but it seems to be uneven in it's technical depth and coverage. Why is there so much coverage given to inputs for example yet no real XNA examples? Surely that's a viable market of programmers. So I'm not clear on the intended audience. Closest I could figure is it's the beginning-intermediate programmer of WP7.The source code examples are sparse and definitely assume you're comfortable with VS2010 C#/.NET and have some wp7 programming experience. The presented event handling methods are just there with no context that would be understandable by the beginning WP7 programmer. There looks to be more depth towards the end with the location stuff and I was interested in the Designing for First Time Approval section. Also gleened some sites to check out in the libraries section. I'd love to see a section on programming and working gestures as it's an area that is fundamental to wp7 interactions and is where I'm currently working on understanding better. Overall it definitely feels like a work-in-progress so it's good that it's free.