The brand new Windows Phone 7 is a great device, and presents a great platform for developers to host applications in Silverlight and XNA, and comes with a lot of great stuff for developers. But what great stuff does it come with? Well, here’s a list:
- Accelerometer
- GPS
- Microphone
- Camera (sort of)
- User pictures (sort of)
- Limited Internet Access
- Modify “Live Tiles” (sort of)
- Utilize “toast” notifications (sort of)
- Multitouch
- Maps (SL Only)
- SMS Messaging
- Contacts
- Silverlight Styles
- AppBar
- Pivot
- Panorama
All of this stuff is really cool to play around with in an application. Let’s see how we can use it. This is intended to give you a quick and dirty overview of all the features so you can get a general view of how to use it in applications.
Accelerometer
An accelerometer gives you information about the physical orientation of the phone. It could be used for a level application, for example. In order to use it, you have to create a new Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Accelerometer. You have to hook up to the ReadingChanged event to get information back. However, this returns a Vector3, which is an XNA class, so be sure to add XNA references to any Silverlight project you use it in.
GPS
The phone’s GPS gives you access to the user’s physical location when you poll it for data. There are also several other classes associated with it that give you useful methods, such as the ability to calculate distance between coordinates. To access the GPS, you need to set up a System.Device.Location.GeoCoordinateWatcher, and hook up to the PositionChanged event. This event returns a Location that includes the user’s spatial coordinates.
Microphone
There are a number of interesting applications for the microphone, which can be accessed through Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio.Microphone. Use Microphone.BufferLength to change the length of recording, and you can use Microphone.Start() and Microphone.Stop() to control recording. The data is 16-bit Mono PCM, which can be fed directly into DynamicSoundEffectInstance.
Camera/Pictures
Accessing the camera is more complicated. It is impossible for 3rd party developers to get a direct feed from the camera, but you can use tasks to get the user to take a static image. Microsoft.Phone.Tasks.CameraCaptureClass provides the functionality to do this. You can hook up to Completed to get the image back (JPG format), and call Show() to get the photo.
The exact same goes for getting user photos. The PhotoChooserTask allows the user to pick a picture to give to the application, and it is returned through the Completed event.
Internet Access
The Windows Phone 7 is locked down for quite a bit of internet access, but allows you to perform HTTP requests the same way you would on a desktop application.
Live Tiles and Toast Notifications
Because your application cannot run in the background, you have to use a different method for getting notifications to the user while they are not using your application. This is done via an external service that pushes data to the phone, in the form of a Live Tile update, a Toast notification, or raw data. This is a complex procedure, and more info can be found here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff941124(VS.92).aspx
Multitouch
The Windows Phone 7 provides a multitouch screen capable of detecting four points on the screen at once. In Silverlight, multitouch support is built in. In XNA, however, you can get this information in the same way as the Zune HD: via the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.TouchPanel class. You can use GetState(), which returns a TouchCollection that you can enumerate to get all of the places on-screen that are currently being touched.
Maps (Silverlight Only)
In Silverlight, you can use the Bing Maps control to show the user a map. You can customize this control with pins and more, and feed it GeoCoordinate data to change the location. It is quite versatile, and can be used in a number of applications.
SMS Messaging (Texting)
One of the primary uses for a cell phone is texting, and you can access this ability through your application. Using the SmsComposeTask class in Microsoft.Phone.Tasks, you can send text messages to any phone number.
Along a similar idea is the EmailComposeTask, which can be used in a similar way to construct emails. You can set the body of the email, the To, CCs, and the Subject, which the user will approve before sending.
Tasks
These tasks are not the only ones. You can find information about all of the tasks here, including getting contact info:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.phone.tasks(VS.92).aspx
Silverlight Styles
The Windows Phone 7 has some pretty stylin’ themes, and as a Silverlight developer, you can take advantage of that. App Templates in Visual Studio 2010 come pre-packaged as one of the following page types:
- Application Page
- This is a simple page with no fancy bits or pieces.
- Pivot Page
- This page is similar to the settings page in WP7, where you have several headers, each with different content, to scroll through horizontally.
- Panorama Page
- The panorama pages are like the Pictures app that comes with WP7, they have a large scrolling picture in the background of a pivot page.
AppBar
The last big feature of WP7 is the AppBar, which is a small bar at the bottom of the page users can interact with. It can slide up to a larger menu, or collapse for a simple menu with icons.
You can customize this appbar in your own Silverlight application, as described here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431801(VS.92).aspx
Hopefully this list will provide an easy to use reference to find anything you need to do on Windows Phone 7. It isn’t intended to tell you everything you need to know, but it should give you a good idea of what WP7 is capable of, and provide easy access to more information. Come back again later, I’ll be going over some of these items in more detail so that you can have your application on its feet in no time.
Windows Phone 7 for Students
And finally, students who are interested in developing applications for Windows Phone 7 can do so - for free. The Microsoft DreamSpark Program allows students to get free access to professional development tools - including Visual Studio 2010 Professional. With the release of WP7, Microsoft extended the program to waive the $100 WP7 Marketplace developer account fee for students through DreamSpark. This means that students can submit 5 applications to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace for free, and start making money from them without paying a penny. But beware - you must be at least 18 to qualify for a developer account, so some high school students will be left out for a couple years.