Windows Phone Development for People in a Hurry

Overview for People in a Hurry

Cost

• Actually developing a Windows Phone App is free using the free tools
• Publishing the app on the Windows Phone Market will cost about 99 USD per year, however it is free if,
  • You are a student eligible for Microsoft Dreamspark scheme
  • You are a startup business/freelancer eligible for Microsoft Bizspark
• Microsoft take a 30% share of sales, unless you make over $25,000 at which point they take 20% of sales

Technical overview

• You will need to be pretty familiar with object-orientated programming to program Windows Phone and C#
• There are four options for developing for Window Phone, of which we focus on the latter,
  • HTML/Javascript (introduced in Windows Phone 8)
  • Native C++ (introduced in Windows Phone 8)
  • XNA platform (for 3D applications)
  • Silverlight platform (for 2D applications)
• The Silverlight Windows Phone platform is a subset of Silverlight which is itself a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation . When searching for solutions first try including 'Windows Phone' then try 'Silverlight', then try 'WPF'
• The UI for all of the above is written in 'eXtensible Application Markup Language' (XAML) which is a dialect of XML and the backend is written in either C# or Visual Basic (VB)
• If you are coming with no knowledge of VB or C# , opt for C#
• XAML/C# is directly comparable to HTML/Javascript however,
  • XAML/C# are much cleaner languages
  • XAML/C# are tailored for the task of writing applications
  • HTML/Javascript apps takes less changes to port to another platform
  • There is no direct equivalent for CSS although you can save XAML styles and apply them to multiple XAML elements