Resources for Windows Phone Mango Developers

Last week we released Beta 2 of the Mango developer tools. Even more excitingly, we made pre-release images of the Mango OS for retail devices available to developers registered with App Hub. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to get started now building outstanding Windows Phone apps leveraging all of the new functionality we’ve added in Windows Phone Mango.

We didn’t just release the tools and images; we also released a very large number of online resources to help you get started leveraging Mango functionality today.

As anyone watching our page on Reddit or our Twitter tag knows, there are a very large set of resources being created on a weekly basis for Windows Phone developers. Since I’m the Product Manager at Microsoft responsible for Windows Phone Developer Educational Content, I thought I’d start a series of posts to highlight the ones I think are most interesting and useful. Today’s post is specifically about Mango developer resources. Here they are:

1. Official Windows Phone Developer documentation on the MSDN Library. This is where we publish all of our official documentation. Quite a bit of new content was added here concurrent with our release of the new SDK, including:
   1. What’s new in the Windows Phone SDK
   2. Code Samples for Windows Phone; includes 26 new samples just for Mango
   3. Our ‘How To’ index. This is where we link to all of the specific pages within the documentation that explicitly spell out ‘how to’ implement a specific type of developer scenario. Many of these actually map to and spell out the execution of the sample code in the code samples. Some of the most interesting How To documents for Mango features include:
      1. SL & XNA together: How to: Combine Silverlight and the XNA Framework in a Windows Phone Application
      2. Profiler: How to: Improve the Responsiveness of Your Application Using the Windows Phone Profiler
      3. Fast App Switching: How to: Preserve and Restore Application State
      4. Database: How to: Create a Basic Local Database Application for Windows Phone
      5. Sockets: How to: Create and Use a TCP Socket Client Application for Windows Phone
      6. Sockets: How to: Create and Use a UDP Socket Client Application for Windows Phone
      7. Camera: How to: Create a Base Camera Application for Windows Phone
      8. Camera: How to: Extend the Pictures Hub with App Connect for Windows Phone
      9. Audio: How to: Play Background Audio for Windows Phone
      10. Periodic Agent: How to: Implement Scheduled Tasks for Windows Phone
      11. Motion API: How to: Use the Combined Motion API for Windows Phone
      12. Search Extensibility: How to: Extend Search with App Connect for Windows Phone
      13. Tiles: How to: Create, Delete, and Update Tiles for Windows Phone
2. Windows Phone Mango Training Course. Now updated for beta 2 of the SDK. The Windows Phone Mango Training course, (like our previous training course for the initial release of Windows Phone 7), provides you step by step guidance, with complete sample code, demonstrating how to leverage the new developer scenarios in Windows Phone Mango to create a variety of real world applications. For the new training course, we decided to have the various labs all revolve around a single, more useful application, a task manager we called ‘Tidy’. You can get a video introduction to the ‘Tidy’ application here on Channel 9.
3. The Inside Windows Phone Show on Channel 9. This show is our home on Channel 9, where we’ll provide you video walkthroughs of our new developer features, on a periodic basis. So far, we’ve conducted a number on Mango functionality, including the following:
   1. Inside the Mango Camera APIs
   2. Search Extras in Mango
   3. Sockets in Mango
   4. Inside the Mango Documentation
4. App Hub Game Developer Resources, updated for Mango. This page is where we centralize all of our Windows Phone game developer resources, and we’ve updated it for Mango. Here you’ll find the following items, (among others):
   1. What’s new for games in Windows Phone OS 7.1
   2. Game State Management
   3. Migration Guide: From the Game Class to Silverlight/XNA
   4. Model Viewer Demo

This is but a small sample of the large set of resources we’ve currently got available. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be releasing more items targeted at helping you leverage all of the fantastic new developer features in Mango.

Larry Lieberman
Product Manager, Windows Phone App Platform

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