Girl Geek app for Windows Phone 7 resources, slides and write up from #BGGD39

Last week I had the great pleasure to present one of the sessions at the Brussels Girl Geek Dinner event held at Microsoft on February 16th. This must really have been the first time doing a job-related presentation where the the majority of the audience was female. Unfortunately I see very few women attending technical events, but that’s just the reality in the industry. Another reason to be really excited to present for the BGGD!
I took the opportunity of combining my passion for technology with another passion: fashion.

> If you’re looking for the info on getting started with building for Windows Phone 7 yourself jump down to that section directly.

 

The event and sessions

The Microsoft office welcomed around 100 girl geeks, some of which with their “sacoche” as they are called (male friend) tailing along. After an introduction by founder Clo Willaerts, Mee Hyang Van Den Broeck gave an overview of the phone’s user interface and main end-user features. Next to showing the people and photo hubs, camera function and messages there was one very funny app to close off the keynote: the Hangover Helper app. Very funny and you never know if might come in handy

The second session way my Windows Phone 7 Girl Geek App session. I had great fun combining a fashion idea with the Windows Phone 7. By using Windows Phone 7 developer tools, in this case mainly Expression Blend and using built-in controls such as the Panorama control.
By taking advantage of designing through Expression Blend you can have a very quick start on your application. I left out most code in Visual Studio since I wanted to keep it visual for non-developers. See below for some great resources on getting started yourself.
Note: picture used in my demo app comes from Flickr, user Kekkoz: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kekkoz/4237812593/

The last presenter was the amazing Steffest who went into ‘hacking’ Windows Phone 7. Hacking is not really the correct term, as Stef had the chance to play with the phone for a good month and the deal was: try out whatever you want but when you return it working and in one piece. He did just that and showed how to control the Powerpoint presentation using his phone, using the XBMC Remote7 app to control media center and how to control a robot. In this case the actual robot had a bit of an accident but the alternative was controlling a led to turn green or red. Amazing, very entertaining and honest presentation style. I loved it!

After the sessions my colleagues behind @MicrosoftBe had foreseen paëlla, a nice seating setup and some sweet goodie bags. I had very nice conversations with other girl geeks and guys. Looking forward to the next event.

Check out the saved Twitter stream at Keepstream.com

Building a Windows Phone 7 Application

How to get started with Windows Phone 7

• Download tools: https://create.msdn.com
  Free tools are in a single download that contains Visual Studio for Windows Phone, Expression Blend (special version for Windows Phone), the Emulator and some other tools.
• Learn online:
  • Windows Phone 7 Development for Absolute Beginners: https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Windows-Phone-7-Development-for-Absolute-Beginners
  • Quicktarts: http://create.msdn.com/en-us/education/quickstarts
  • Windows Phone 7 Training Kit: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/wp7trainingcourse.aspx
  • .toolbox: not to miss resource for learning Expression Blend and Silverlight (not specific for Windows Phone but very much recommended): https://www.microsoft.com/design/toolbox/
• Windows Phone 7 Design Guidelines
  • Windows Phone 7 Series UI Design & Interaction Guide (pdf)
  • Windows Phone 7 Design Guidelines – Cheat Sheet
• Marketplace registration: https://create.msdn.com
• Some good frameworks:
  • While working on my demo I had some fun trying out WP7 Contrib (https://wp7contrib.codeplex.com/), which is a new project that gathers a set of tools and other frameworks to help you with building Windows Phone 7 applications faster.
    Kudos to my friend Richard Griffin (@RichGee) as one of the main drivers behind this project.
  • MVVM Light (also part of WP7 Contrib but can be used on its own): https://mvvmlight.codeplex.com/
  • patterns & practices - Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide

Let me know if any of you ends up building an app, or trying it out!