Windows Phone 7: Getting ready

In this post I'll cover the first steps needed to be done, towards developing windows-phone-7 apps and games.
Bottom up:

1. Framework -
   The basic layer of the Windows Phone 7 is the special .NET framework.
   I'm talking about the new .NET XNA framework.
   The XNA framework is a set of tools with a managed runtime environment provided by Microsoft that facilitates computer game development(especially the XBOX) and management.
   With the latest .NET 4 framework we can now write our own apps libraries and services for Windows Phone 7.
   
2. IDE -
   In this section we have two approaches:
   - Visual Studio 2010: This is the major IDE for writing and compiling .NET code, where we can create a new project based o the Windows Phone 7 Game project template.
   
   - Microsoft Expression Blend 4: This is a full-featured professional design tool for creating engaging and sophisticated user interfaces for Microsoft WPF/Silverlight/Windows Phone.
   
   The first approach, is usually for pure code development, while the second is a designer at first.
   
3. Emulator
   To emulate the smart phone/device we will use the Xde, which can be launch like that: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Tools\XDE Launcher\XdeLauncher.exe" "Windows Phone 7" "Windows Phone 7 Emulator"

OK, now what? After we have downloaded and installed the Framework, SDK and IDE we are good to go!
See you on the next post…