Introduction:

Before starting with the development process of the Windows Phone 7, let’s seen on what the prerequisites are required.

Software Requirement:

• Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW
• Visual Studio 2010 Express
• Zune Software
• Silverlight [more]
• Windows Phone 7 UI Design and Interface Guide
• Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Certification Requirements
• Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Express
• Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.2 June 2010
• Azure SDK June 2010
• Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone
  

Hardware Requirement:

Below are the minimum requirements for windows mobile phone 7 manufacturers taken into consideration in order to maintain some standard across the manufacturers.

Windows Phone Platform:

Microsoft has provided windows phone 7 with existing .net core functionalities and libraries like Threading, LINQ, Multi threading, XML programming, Security, Reflection , Localization and Globalization. Apart from these available resources in Windows Phone 7 they have added 2 more major frameworks: Silverlight and XNA.

Silverlight:

Silverlight is basically used for light weight business applications and normal 2D games development using the XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) Programming. Developers will have much flexibility using this framework along with much used UI tools like Microsoft Blend, Adobe Photoshop etc. to create a vector based process that can be easily transported to XAML. This is really a not new topic compared to the XNA development since Silverlight is already in market for developing rich browser applications and it provides an option of creating applications with XAML which is highly advantageous of creating a vector based application. So it gives the developers on full control of the layout, design, structure and also the data binding components.

XNA:

XNA is basically used for developing rich games where the framework comes with a game engine (with 3D) which helps the game developers to provide rich 3D games. Unlike Silverlight XNA is not much known across the developers since it has been used to develop Xbox games using Managed code. Why Microsoft provided the XNA engine with the windows phone 7 is mainly because of integration of Xbox live integration with Windows Phone 7. XNA engine provides the rich user experience that ever y developers take advantage in providing next generation games with 2D and 3D game loop engines.

Using Azure:
When we create an application with Windows Phone 7, we need to save some data for future retrieval which is going to be bit tough here. Windows phone 7 doesn’t provide the direct connectivity with database to save the data. To overcome this we need to use AZURE, Windows azure provides the platform of Cloud Computing in storing and retrieving the data from different locations using Windows Phone 7. Say today we created a small application in windows phone 7 using Silverlight. Day to-day when the development increases and finally we get an excellent product, then the number of user visit gets increased which eventually requires an enterprise database to save the details. So at this case we can use the Azure availability of extending the size of the database as per the need since it maintains in the cloud. If we use Azure for the development of the Windows Phone 7, Microsoft has provided with an additional advantage of using Bing Maps which is given free of cost only for the windows phone 7. Additionally Push notification services are also been provided in the cloud where we can use it to send notifications to the mobiles as Text which is eventually a bitter process for the business needs.

Development Life Cycle:

We as developers of windows phone 7 we need to register with App hub using the below link http://create.msdn.com/en-US/ and giving our Windows Live credentials which acts like a single sign on for all the process which Microsoft provides. The main idea behind registering with App hub is once registered and developed an application in Windows Mobile phone 7 we can use our registered hand set as a physical device tester to test our application. App Hub provides developers with up to 3 devices can be registered and test it in real-time.
Now let us jump through the steps involved in the application development life cycle of the windows phone 7.

Step 1 – Register with App Hub
As mentioned above App hub is the Microsoft place where we need to register and use for testing the application in real-time. Please follow the below steps to register in App Hub.
Steps to register the APP HUB

Step 2 – Market Place Certification procedures.
Once we are registered with the App Hub, before proceeding with the development consider reading the certification process document in order to avoid rejection of the product at the market level. Please refer to the below link for the Application Certification process checklist and validation.
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9730558

Once the development is completed and the validation process is checked and passed by the Market, then the application will be available online for downloads. Microsoft reserves the rights to give 5 free applications downloads and unlimited number of paid application downloads.

Microsoft charges an amount of 99$ for the market place registration to submit the application developed. And for each download the Microsoft takes 30% of the fees paid and the developer will get 70% for his development charge.

Conclusion:

In this article we have seen on the prerequisites required before starting development process with windows phone 7.