101 Windows Phone 7 Apps, Volume I

Book excerpt: Full Color INCLUDES COMPLETE CODE AND ASSETS FOR EACH APP IN THIS VOLUME! Got a great idea for an app? There’s a chapter for that! Calling all developers: Windows Phone 7 is starting to gain traction, and the opportunity is yours to sell the next killer app! 101 Windows Phone 7 Apps is a book series like no other–best-selling author and Microsoft developer Adam Nathan walks you through the process of building 101 real, robust, diverse, and marketplace-certified Silverlight applications. You not only get online access to the full source code and related assets, but the book is chock full of tips, warnings, and advice that can only come from Adam’s experience of writing so many complete applications and selling them in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Imagine how long it would take you to develop and test 50 apps and how much you would learn from the experience. Rather than spending all that time starting from scratch, use this book to hit the ground running! Whether you simply make cosmetic changes to apps in this book (for example, creating kid-themed versions), repurpose apps (such as building a mortgage calculator based on Chapter 10’s tip calculator), or build something completely unique, this book can greatly accelerate your development time and help you create high-quality apps. Sell your apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace and make this book pay for itself! Volume I contains the first 50 apps and covers the following: Everything you need to know about Silverlight Fully exploiting phone features such as the application bar, hardware/software keyboards, multi-touch, accelerometer, microphone, and more Using rich controls such as pivots, panoramas, and controls in free toolkits, such as date/time pickers, toggle switches, charts, and graphs Building your own custom controls, including popular ones missing from the platform, such as a checkable list box, multi-select picker box, and color picker Broadly applicable pages, such as a photo-cropping page and accelerometer-calibration page How to make your app look and feel like a first-party app Practical tips on a wide range of topics, even acquiring and creating sound effects, using custom fonts, and creating icons