Windows Phone and .NET : Looking Closely at Visual Studio Development for Windows Phone

We can develop either using Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, which is available free of charge, or by using one of the full versions of Visual Studio. Both products will produce the same resulting games and applications. Visual Studio 2010 has system requirements that necessitate a reasonably modern PC, running either Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 or Windows 7. Both x86 and x64 versions of the operating system can be used, but the Starter Editions of Windows are not supported. A DirectX 10 or later graphics card with a WDDM 1.1 driver is required for developing games using XNA. In practice, this requirement will be met by most graphics cards from the last couple of years, although many mobile graphics chips present in laptop computers might lack these capabilities.

There is no support for developing for Windows Phone in earlier versions of Visual Studio. The good news is that Visual Studio 2010 will install side by side with earlier versions of Visual Studio without causing any problems, so if you need to keep Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 on your PC, you can.

1. Language Choices

.NET development offers the choice of a number of different languages including C#, VB, and C++. Currently, however, only C# is supported for Windows Phone development. Microsoft is promising support for VB in the near future, so check the latest version of the development environment if you want to use VB for your development.

If you are already familiar with VB, you should find that both reading and writing C# will come naturally with a little practice.

2. IDE Features

As would be expected from Visual Studio, a number of very useful features are available to help develop and debug Windows Phone applications.

2.1. Emulators

Visual Studio offers a Windows Phone emulator to help test and debug your programs. Although it is essential to use a real device regularly during your application development process to ensure that everything works properly on actual hardware, being able to use the emulator for general coding and testing is extremely useful. A screenshot of the Windows Phone emulator is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Windows Phone emulator

The emulator offers a full implementation of the physical device and is capable of running genuine Windows Phone applications. It offers access to a number of features of the device, including the ability to simulate networking, screen rotation, and touch screen input using the mouse cursor. (In fact, if you are developing on a Windows 7 computer with a touch-enabled screen, you can perform touch and multitouch operations on the emulator by touching your PC screen.)

Running your application in an emulator is as simple as can be: just select to use the emulator within the Visual Studio IDE and start your application. The emulator will appear, and your program will run.

When we fire up the emulator shortly, note that it takes a little while to initialize itself. This would get frustrating very quickly when you are in a repeat modify/compile/test cycle, but the emulator can be left running in the background when you stop your code from executing and will then resume much more quickly the next time you begin a debug session. When the emulator's Close button is clicked, it will prompt for confirmation that the emulator is really no longer required, which is very useful protection against accidentally closing the window without actually meaning to.

2.2. Silverlight Page Designer

A fully featured page designer is available to lay out windows and controls for use within Silverlight programs. The designer goes as far as to display an image of the device around the edge of your page to help visualize its appearance.

Silverlight pages can be created and modified by either using the designer or by editing the underlying eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML, which is generally pronounced "zammal"). Visual Studio will display both the designer and the XAML editor as side-by-side panels within the IDE, as shown in Figure 2, and any change made to either will be immediately reflected in the corresponding panel. This provides a very flexible mechanism for page design, allowing each panel to work together to perform their actions more efficiently.

Figure 2. The Silverlight page editor showing the designer and page source together

2.3. Breakpoints

Another extremely useful tool is Visual Studio's breakpoint feature. No doubt familiar to any desktop developer, breakpoints are fully supported for Windows Phone development, too, and can be used both when running against the emulator and against a physical device. It can be extremely useful to break into your code, examine your variables, and step through the instructions while watching the results on a real device on the desk next to you.

2.4. Debug Output

Access to the Visual Studio Output window is available from Windows Phone applications running inside the IDE. Text can be written to the Output window at any time, allowing you to easily keep track of what your program is doing. Pairing this with the ability to have two independent screens (your PC screen and your mobile device screen) makes this tool particularly powerful.