GETTING STARTED

DEVELOPING FOR THE LUMIA 800 WITH WINDOWS PHONE

The Lumia 800 is the first Windows Phone from Nokia. There are two platforms used for making Windows Phone applications:

Silverlight - Great for standard Windows Phone interface-based applications.

XNA -  Great for 3D graphics, sophisticated interactions, custom interfaces and games.

‘HELLO ALPHALABS.CC’ - RUNNING YOUR FIRST EXPERIMENT

Firstly you’ll need to download and install the Windows Phone SDK. You’ll need a PC running Windows 7 or Vista, with at least 3GB of RAM. The emulator requires a DirectX10 graphics card.

More info on system requirements can be found on MSDN.

The Windows Phone SDK includes Visual Studio Express 2010, a complete development environment that allows you to create, test, and deploy your experiments.

Once you have the SDK installed, you’ll want to get your first experiment up and running.

Download the sample code for your first XNA project here  and open it in Visual Studio Express 2010.

Hit compile and run. The emulator launches and the demo code will run.

You can follow a tutorial here to create this application from scratch.

The emulator does have it's limitations. For example, if you’ve made an experiment that uses an accelerometer you’ll want to test this on a real device. To do this, you’ll need to register as a developer with Microsoft . It doesn’t take long, and once you’re finished you’ll be able to run your experiments on your phone.

SAMPLE CODE

You can use the example code listed here to kick start your experiments.

If you’re stuck for ideas, a good way to get started is to try combining two projects, and experimenting with connecting them together.

Accelerometer & Gyro

GPS positioning

2D & 3D graphics and Animation using XNA

Connecting to the internet, sockets and networking

Loading XML data feeds

Using the camera and video

Capturing, playing back and manipulating sounds

There’s also lots of example code available from Microsoft and other 3rd parties.

SUPPORT AND TUTORIALS

If you’re new to developing on Windows Phone, there are lots of freely available tutorials that can help you:

developer.nokia.com - Documentation and Resources for Windows Phone 7.1

Windows Phone 7 for absolute beginners

Programming Windows Phone 7 - Free PDF ebook

If you are having problems with your code, you can post questions here:

developer.nokia.com/community

AppHub Windows Phone Forums

CREATIVE INSPIRATION AND EXTRA RESOURCES

onedotzero.com - A great source of inspirational film, animation and digital work from leading artists around the world.

creativeapplications.net - The biggest creative coding site on the Internet. Full of brilliant work across lots of different platforms and technologies.

arduino.cc - An open-source physical computing platform. Use your Nokia Lumia 800 to control pretty much anything in the real world, and use buttons sensors and inputs to affect things on the phone.