Windows Phone Development

Getting Started with Development

The Hawaii Project at MSR has a good page describing how students can get stared developing applications for Windows Phone. In particular the section titled "Getting Started with Development" contains the four steps required to start writing apps and get them to run on a real phone.

I'm excerpting them here:

1. Download the Free Tools: This download includes the Express edition of Visual Studio 2010. You can use these tools with the Professional edition of Visual Studio instead if you wish (see the Development Tools section below).
2. Create Your First Application: Windows Phone applications can be created using either of the Silverlight or XNA framework. This how-to article uses Silverlight for demonstration purposes. It also demonstrates how to run your application in the emulator.
3. Join App Hub to unlock your phone (needed in order to run your application on a real device). This step can take days to complete, so plan ahead.
   • This step is by far the most time consuming and involves registering with DreamSpark (Microsoft's student developer portal) to get verified a student and registering for App Hub (Microsoft's phone app marketplace) to verify your identity so you can unlock your phone. Fortunately, you can develop apps for the emulator in the meantime.
   • Be sure to follow the instructions carefully
4. Unlock your phone: Once you get an e-mail from "Windows Phone Marketplace Developer Support" saying that you're part of the developer program, you should be able to unlock your phone. The email should look something like this.
   1. Install the Zune software
   2. Connect your phone to your computer make sure that the screen is on and that it is on the home screen
   3. Run All Programs => Microsoft Phone Developer Tools => Windows Phone Developer Registration
   4. Log in with your Live ID that you used to verify your identity.
      Assuming you've been verified by Geo Trust and the phone is on the home screen this should work and you will now be able to deploy apps to the phone.
5. Deploy Your Application to your phone for testing.