Useful Mango Developer Resources

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With the Windows Phone (codenamed) Mango beta release, the Windows Phone team thrived to have great documentation and useful learning resources for WP7 developers.
I think they did a superb job and given it came after MIX (and we had lots of great video content) the docs have gone unnoticed a bit, so I want to highlight a couple of these resources to make sure developers are getting the most out of these.   Today, I will cover the documentation improvements and the new “Mango” training kit.

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If you rather watch videos, here are two that summarize this post:
Luke Nyswonger, lead for Windows Phone online documentation does a video walk through of all the new stuff in the docs.
Yours truly does a walk-through of tidy, one of the apps in the training kit. It is a scenario that we use for five labs: sql ce, background agents, tiles, background transfer, and reminders.
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New Mango training kit:
With the new Windows Phone training kit for Mango release, we did a few things different:

  • The kit is aimed at intermediate level developers. It goes straight into Mango features and the labs are shorter because we skipped a lot of the intro stuff.. Most of the readers for this blog will feel very comfortable and new developers will pick it up quickly and still have the prior Windows Phone Training Kit for introductory material.  
  • The kit takes a scenario approach where instead of having ten or twelve disaggregate/unrelated labs, you have a few hands-on labs that show how multiple features come together to fulfill a scenario.

Here are some of the new samples you will find in the training kit:

  • “Tidy” is a proof of concept to-do list application that takes advantages of Mango features to do smarter tasking. 
    Again, you can see Tidy in action in this video walk-through. If you do Mango presentations or demos, Tidy is a good demonstrator of how new Mango features make an existing application much better. 
    The hands-on labs map quite well to the features it showcases
    • Local database hands-on-Lab. Tidy uses SQL CE as its data store and the hands-on lab will show you how to attribute the object model to create LINQ to SQL mappings. How to create databases at run-time, and how to query the database.
    • Alerts and Reminders hands-on-lab.   Tidy allows you to create reminders for a task. The hands-on lab shows you how to query it a reminder exists, how to create and delete a reminder.
    • Start Tile pinning hands-On-Lab. Tidy allows you to pin every project so you can deep-link into a project. This way if your tasks are organized you can deep-link into project specific views and get the tasks for that specific project.
    • Background Transfer hands-On-Lab shows you how to use the new background transfer APIs to upload and download a backup of the database to your local machine.
    • Background agents hands-on-lab shows you how to create background agents in Mango.  The background agents check your location every 30 minutes and if you are nearby a location where tasks are due, it will prompt you a shell toast notification to remind you to complete the task while you are at that location. 
      The background agent also demonstrates how to update the tiles from an agent – it checks tasks that are overdue and it updates the tile for the project with the count-.
  • The “Photofun”  hands-on lab demonstrates the new live camera stream APIs. It captures the live camera stream and applies effects to it; it integrates with the camera hardware button to capture images when the button is pressed.
  • The XNA 3D Model Viewer hands-on-lab shows you how to use the new shared graphics model so you can visualize XNA-based 3D models in a Silverlight application.   It also demonstrates using the new background transfer APIs to download the models from an Azure store.
  • The new device capabilities hands-on lab shows you how to use the new Mango APIs (and some 7.0 APIs) to query device capabilities.  With the new APIs you can detect if compass and gyro are supported, you can detect the type of network connection the device is using, and other generic device information.

Great improvements and additions to the documentation
The documentation team also did a few things different. 

  • There is a great “What’s new” page that you can use to get to all the feature overviews, code-samples, etc..
  • The samples and how-to walkthroughs are now a bit more scenario oriented. For example, their sockets demo is a full blown tic-tac-toe game.
    They have a lot of comprehensive how-tos on the new APIs. Including the profiler, camera APIs, Background APIs, etc.  If it’s new, you will find a how to! 
  • They have moved the User experience Design guidelines from a PDF to an HTML format and they literally doubled the amount of content that went into the UX guidelines.
  • They have moved the certification requirements from a PDF to an HTML format, and they have included the test steps so you can ensure you test ahead of time (or if you fail certification you have repro steps.
  • They have a very nice “developer resources page” in the apphub that aggregates all the content that Windows phone developers will need

Again, if you want to see a brief video of these changes, Luke will give you a walk through in this video

With all the above changes, developers can find every thing easily, they get a very comprehensive (and deep) view into the features, and they can even have fun while doing it.
Thanks to the doc teams (and the PMs that reviewed it ) for all this goodness; I am sure I missed some; if you find it, comment on it please (or write your own blog post about it ).

Happy Windows Phone coding! Don’t forget to read the docs.