Windows Phone eBook 1st Edition Published

“It was with a sense of trepidation that I blogged a request for people who might like to help create a Windows Phone eBook back in February 2011. Despite my initial scepticism, there was an overwhelming response; both from people interested in the idea and those keen to volunteer their time and knowledge to help make it a reality.

The idea was simple. Combine useful, technical information about the platform, written by those who’d been there and done it, with some stories about the people and the apps they’d written. The book would act as a handy reference that gave you a “puddy up” into developing on the platform and, importantly, helped you avoid making the same mistakes others had made.

The plan was always to publish an initial set of chapters and then iterate, adding new chapters and updating / refining existing chapters as we went. The initial iteration has taken much longer than I expected for many reasons. I’m just hoping we can do some performance tuning to make things happen a bit quicker next time around.

My role has mainly been one of coordination and the reviewing / editing of content. Without the help of all the contributors (see below) and Rachel Collier, Ginger Howard, John Donnelly and Martin Beeby at Microsoft, this thing would exist only on my whiteboard.

Contributors (so far): Colin Eberhardt, Pete Vickers, Andy Gore, Mike Hole, Gergely Orosz, Sasha Kotlyar, Dominic Betts, Will Johnson, Ben Cameron, James Bearne, Samidip Basu, Paul Marsh, Stuart Lodge”

The above is taken from the foreword of “Building Windows Phone Apps: A Developer’s Guide” – a community effort to capture useful information and learning about building apps on the Windows Phone platform. I’m pleased to announce that the 1st edition is available for download today:

Download Building Windows Phone Apps: A Developer’s Guide

This is an organic effort – more chapters will be added and chapters will be updated as and when contributors choose to do so. I have a number of additional chapters in my inbox at the moment – expect those to be edited and included in the 2nd edition in the near future.

Meanwhile I’d like to thank everyone that’s been involved, apologise again for the time it’s taken to get to this point, and encourage you to download the eBook.

Lastly, please send us your feedback – good, bad or ugly. Leave a comment here or contact me direct.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2011
  Well done! Great effort by all the contributors - skimmed the content and looks ideal as a primer with some more advanced topics - spatial queries don't usually make it into general literature. The Chooser ‘gotchas’ table (courtesy of Peter Foot) came just at the right time for an app update :-)

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2011
  I confess I hadn't tried to download it on a device. I suspect it's something to do with specific characters in the filename. I'll have a play and see if I can fix it. Mike

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2011
  Any chance of a mobi or epub version? Reading PDFs on a Kindle is pretty painful. I'd happily pay for a mobi version if it was made available

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2011
  I'll echo the call for a .mobi version.

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2011
  @ David, Chris It's definitely in my plans Mike

• Anonymous
  October 11, 2011
  I'd love to see a .mobi version as well :)