Windows Phone Mango Developer Resources

With Microsoft’s continuous effort to help developers work with Windows Phone development, Larry Lieberman over at the Windows Phone Blog has posted a great resource article for developers. Larry is the Product Manager for the Windows Phone App Platform, so it can be guaranteed any article he posts is a hand-in-hand how-to on everything you can do with the Windows Phone platform. With the recent release of Beta 2 of the Mango developer tools,  Microsoft also released a very large number of online resources to help you get started leveraging Mango functionality. Lieberman’s initial resources post is the first of many, he promises, of a series that he thinks will provide the most interesting and useful information. Within the coming weeks and months more items will be released at helping developers leverage all the new features in Mango.

Official Windows Phone Developer documentation on the MSDN Library. This is where we publish all of our official documentation. Quite a bit of new content was added here concurrent with our release of the new SDK, including:

1. What’s new in the Windows Phone SDK
2. Code Samples for Windows Phone; includes 26 new samples just for Mango
3. Our ‘How To’ index. This is where we link to all of the specific pages within the documentation that explicitly spell out ‘how to’ implement a specific type of developer scenario. Many of these actually map to and spell out the execution of the sample code in the code samples. Some of the most interesting How To documents for Mango features include:
   1. SL & XNA together: How to: Combine Silverlight and the XNA Framework in a Windows Phone Application
   2. Profiler: How to: Improve the Responsiveness of Your Application Using the Windows Phone Profiler
   3. Fast App Switching: How to: Preserve and Restore Application State
   4. Database: How to: Create a Basic Local Database Application for Windows Phone
   5. Sockets: How to: Create and Use a TCP Socket Client Application for Windows Phone
   6. Sockets: How to: Create and Use a UDP Socket Client Application for Windows Phone
   7. Camera: How to: Create a Base Camera Application for Windows Phone
   8. Camera: How to: Extend the Pictures Hub with App Connect for Windows Phone
   9. Audio: How to: Play Background Audio for Windows Phone
   10. Periodic Agent: How to: Implement Scheduled Tasks for Windows Phone
   11. Motion API: How to: Use the Combined Motion API for Windows Phone
   12. Search Extensibility: How to: Extend Search with App Connect for Windows Phone
   13. Tiles: How to: Create, Delete, and Update Tiles for Windows Phone

Windows Phone Mango Training Course. Now updated for beta 2 of the SDK. The Windows Phone Mango Training course, (like our previous training course for the initial release of Windows Phone 7), provides you step by step guidance, with complete sample code, demonstrating how to leverage the new developer scenarios in Windows Phone Mango to create a variety of real world applications. For the new training course, we decided to have the various labs all revolve around a single, more useful application, a task manager we called ‘Tidy’. You can get a video introduction to the ‘Tidy’ applicationhere on Channel 9.

The Inside Windows Phone Show on Channel 9. This show is our home on Channel 9, where we’ll provide you video walkthroughs of our new developer features, on a periodic basis. So far, we’ve conducted a number on Mango functionality, including the following:

1. Inside the Mango Camera APIs
2. Search Extras in Mango
3. Sockets in Mango
4. Inside the Mango Documentation

App Hub Game Developer Resources, updated for Mango. This page is where we centralize all of our Windows Phone game developer resources, and we’ve updated it for Mango. Here you’ll find the following items, (among others):

1. What’s new for games in Windows Phone OS 7.1
2. Game State Management
3. Migration Guide: From the Game Class to Silverlight/XNA
4. Model Viewer Demo