MS Silverlight Edition: Programming Windows Phone 7 [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

If your goal is to learn the minute details of manipulating pixel-level graphics on the Windows Phone 7 platform, this is the book for you. On the other hand, if you want to design and write complete apps (that you can sell), this book will not help you very much. "Programming Windows Phone 7" is essentially the WP7 version of Petzold's 20-year-old "Programming Windows" in both style and coverage.

Places where it falls short:

* The WP7 approach to cooperative multitasking leads to a rather convoluted state model for apps. Petzold's discussion of what happens when a user hits the "Back" or "Home" buttons is scattered throughout the book. There really is no unified, coherent discussion of tombstoning or the stacking behavior of app pages. Getting this aspect of an app right is tricky. It's amazing that such a crucial topic is dealt with in such an incomplete manner.

* Very little emphasis is placed on the correct design of a good WP7 user experience. There are lots details about specific control properties, but nothing about how to use those controls in a way that's appropriate for a phone. Essentially, Petzold tells the reader how to write great desktop apps for the WP7 platform. (Fail...)

* Panorama and pivot controls -- central features of the WP7 interface -- aren't discussed until about page 700.

* WP7 is intended to part of an integrated Cloud experience, yet Petzold barely mentions the important topics of network connectivity (e.g., WCF RIA services) or push notifications ("they exist"). And of course, without push notifications, you don't get much in the way of live tile updates on the Start hub. Again, the thinking seems to be driven by a very "1990s desktop" mindset.

* Virtually no mention is made of using tools like Expression Blend to prototype and build an app's page layout and UI structure. Just as Petzold's earlier book focused on the use of low-level window messages to implement menus, so his WP7 book focuses on hand-generated XAML. In an app marketplace expecting quick turnaround and agile development, no developer in his right mind is going to craft a user interface at that level. It's just not cost-effective. (This is especially true if your team consists of developers writing code and designers creating the UI. Designers are never going to craft an interface from raw XAML -- just as they wouldn't write a website in raw HTML anymore.)

* Finally, there's his writing style. Over the years, Petzold's prose has become more and more florid, and apparently no one at Microsoft Press has the courage or good sense to do any editing. (If you're not sure whether prose is too flowery for a technical book, ask yourself if it sounds like something Edgar Allan Poe might have written: "And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain [...]" If the answer is "yes," then it needs editing. In Petzold's case, the answer is "yes" far too often.)

So, I really wouldn't recommend this book for serious WP7 app developers.

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of great WP7 app-writing books available at the moment. The ones I found useful were:

* Professional Windows Phone 7 Application Development: Building Applications and Games Using Visual Studio, Silverlight, and XNA (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

* Foundation Expression Blend 4 with Silverlight

The first book covers all the bases for Silverlight-based WP7 apps. It gives thorough coverage of the app-state model, and shallower treatment of many other topics. The second book is a general work on how to use Expression Studio and Visual Studio to write Silverlight apps; it isn't phone-specific, but it provides a lot of good background skills.

As a final comment, I'd add that you'll still need to go through the tutorials on Microsoft's Windows Phone developer website. There's a tremendous amount of useful information there, and it would be a mistake to try writing apps for WP7 without taking advantage of that resource.

I recently purchased this book and started to read it and was amazed how much information it contains. It has some introductory chapters going over topics including touch, bitmaps, and even the sensors available as well as some issues you can expect to arise. The second part covers silverlight. As a developer who has had some experience with Silverlight I found these chapters useful not only as a refresher but in explaining the differences in the desktop and the phone versions of Silverlight (there are some minor differences.

The examples provided are simple enough that a learner can follow them but grow in complexity so that you can use them as a basis for real world solutions.

My only minor issue with the book are the typos that show up every so often. However they are not numerous enough nor bad enough to take away from the content of the book.

This book is a step by step linking explination on how to ammend & design internal platform concepts of design with Visual Studio,C++ &C#. You will need a previous knowlage programming though !