Foreword by Larry Lieberman

For the majority of people in the world, their mobile phone will be their first computer. Here at Microsoft, we have recognized this for a long time. We entered the mobile market back in the 1990s and produced a reasonable offering, Windows® Mobile, which provided developers with a rich and compelling platform on which they could build a multitude of solutions.

In 2007 we recognized that our offering was no longer competitive and that to remain relevant we would have to reboot Windows Mobile in a drastic way. Our prime directive in this reboot was to deliver a fresh, compelling end-user experience targeted at making it extremely easy for people to perform the types of tasks we know people want to perform on their phones.

While we knew that we needed a drastic reboot of our focus and our end-user story on the phone, we didn't want to discard the things we knew we did well—specifically, our developer platform. Microsoft is a developer-focused company with many decades of experience delivering the required platforms and tools to developers. In building the application platform for Windows Phone we took advantage of the best developer tools and platform components that Microsoft had to offer. The result was a platform that's easy to use, and which enables developers to deliver compelling applications and game experiences that naturally extend the experiences of the phone itself.

However, tools and platforms alone are often not enough. For quite some time, the patterns & practices team has focused on providing detailed guidance about how to best use our tools and platforms. The first edition of this guide did an excellent job of teaching developers how to apply their skills to build a comprehensive end-to-end solution for Windows Phone.

Windows Phone 7.5 represents a very large expansion of the Windows Phone development platform. Therefore, we knew that a corresponding update to the patterns & practices guide was in order. We think this guide will provide you with everything you need to know to develop a wide range of compelling solutions that use the Windows Phone platform.

We'd also like your feedback. Let us know what you think of the Windows Phone platform at https://wpdev.uservoice.com.

Sincerely,

Larry Lieberman

Senior Product Manager, Windows Phone Application Platform

Next Topic | Previous Topic | Home

Last built: May 25, 2012