Developing with Windows Mobile 7
Microsoft recently announced the general availability of developer tools for their Windows mobile platform. This article is a brief introduction to the platform and what the next generation of mobile development for Microsoft looks like.
After you’ve downloaded the developer tools installer, you will go through a download process…
After downloading the remaining components, you will install all component resources.
Once the developer tools have been installed, you can startup Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone which is the IDE used for the mobile development.
We will use the Silverlight for Windows Phone – Windows Phone Application project template and add some custom XAML and image resource to the base project.
In this simple application we’ve titled Mobile Portal just going to add some textblocks, buttons, and use a standard Silverlight grid layout. We first modify MainPage.xaml to create our custom view for the mobile application. Here is a view of our coding changes.
Next, we go to our Solution Explorer add our image resource using the context menu on the project and selecting Add -> Existing Item.
Finally, we add our custom styles to App.xaml. After building the solution and running the emulator, we see the following results.
If we rotate the device orientation, we can see how the view shifts to fit the space available.
We are glad to see that Microsoft is embracing the WPF and Silverlight-based development engine for the mobile platform. This decision allows developers and designers skilled in XAML to leverage their existing knowledge and prowess to create useful mobile applications for both business and pleasure. The small footprint of Silverlight makes it ideal for usage with embedded or mobile systems with limited power and memory.
You can download our complete solution here.
Tags: Silverlight, Windows Mobile Phone, Windows Phone Application, WPF, XAML
