The smart phone is increasingly important in people’s daily lives. It is used for a wide variety of tasks, both work-related and non-work related. People use smart phones to keep up to date with friends and family, for relaxation, and for entertainment, as well as for viewing documents and spreadsheets, surfing the Internet, and enriching their lives. There is therefore considerable scope for building smart phone applications. Windows Phone is not just another smart phone; rather, it is positioned as an opportunity for developers to build applications that can make a real difference to people’s lives. The platform has been designed from the ground up to support an all-encompassing, integrated, and attractive user experience.

Windows Phone 7 Development Internals covers the breadth of application development for the Windows Phone platform, both the major 7 and 7.1/7.5 versions and the minor 7.1.1 version, and shows how you can build such compelling and useful applications. You can build applications for Windows Phone 7.x by using either the Microsoft Silverlight runtime or the XNA runtime. This book focuses on Silverlight applications. The primary development and design tools are Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend. Here again, this book focuses on Visual Studio.

Each chapter covers a handful of related features. For each feature, the book provides one or more sample applications and walks you through the significant code (C# and XAML). This will help you to understand the techniques used and also the design and implementation choices that you have in each case. Potential pitfalls are called out, as are scenarios in which you can typically make performance or user experience improvements. An underlying theme is to conform not only to the user interface design guidelines, but also to the notion of a balanced, healthy phone ecosystem.