It’s my great pleasure to announce today a comprehensive package to leverage your development skills while learning to build applications for Windows Phone. The Microsoft & Nokia agreement has been described at length over the past few months and, like Matt Bencke highlighted, one of our goals has been to make it easy for Nokia Symbian developers to learn Windows Phone.
So, folks from Microsoft and Nokia worked together to build a great package to help you get started. This helpful package contains the following tools and documentation to help you along the path to learning Windows Phone development:
- The “Windows Phone Guide for Symbian Qt Application Developers” white paper,
- The addition of Symbian Qt to the Windows Phone API mapping tool
- The “Nokia Windows Phone Training” roadshow, a series of developer events starting today in Paris
These complement the similar iOS/Android guidance & mapping work we released a couple months ago.
The “Windows Phone Guide for Symbian Qt Application Developers” white paper is about 100 pages organized in 8 chapters.
Chapter 1: Introducing Windows Phone Platform
to Symbian^3 Qt Application Developers- Chapter 2: Windows Phone Application Design Guidelines
- Chapter 3: Windows Phone Developer and Designer Tools
- Chapter 4: C# programming
- Chapter 5: Introducing Windows Phone Application Life Cycle
- Chapter 6: Porting Applications to Windows Phone
- Chapter 7: Windows Phone Example Applications
- Chapter 8: Using the API Mapping Tool
The white paper is available in different formats (HTML, DOCX & PDF). Feel free to leave comments, suggestions, and/or corrections on the online version.
Chapter 6 introduces porting tutorials, in which you will find practical examples and tips on how to port your applications, like the RSS Reader applications or the “Diner” example, a catalog-type restaurant information application. From design consideration to data binding, the porting story addresses many aspects of the process that will be useful to you; the developer.
The full list of samples and source code is available to you.
The addition of Symbian Qt to the Windows Phone API mapping tool is another perk we wanted to deliver in order to speed up the learning curve to Windows Phone. For this first iteration of the mapping, we’ve focused on the core libraries for Qt 4.7 for Symbian (QtCore, QtGui, QtLocation, QtNetwork, QtSensors, QtSql, QtXml, QtWebKit, QML Elements, QML Components ). We invite you to offer up ideas about what additional mapping you feel would make sense and would like to see included in the tool.
Finally, keep an eye on the “Nokia Windows Phone Training” roadshow, starting today in Paris, France. During this one day training event, you’ll learn how to take your ideas and get them running on the Windows Phone platform. Upcoming dates and locations for the roadshow are as follows: Milan, Italy (Sept 26), Madrid, Spain (Sept 29), Berlin, Germany (Oct 4) , London, United Kingdom (Oct 10) and Silicon Valley, USA – date & details coming soon!
Similar events are also happening in Australia: Sydney (Sept 24-25[SOLD OUT], Oct 8-9), Melbourne (Oct 8-9[SOLD OUT, wait list]) and Brisbane (Oct 8-9).
We realize this is only a few dates and locations, so for all the developers who want to learn Windows Phone, I recommend that you follow at your own pace the EXCELLENT “Window Phone Mango Jump Start” online video training. And stay tuned, there’s more to come!
Start Today!
We’re all eager to see the Nokia hardware running Windows Phone. Windows Phone Mango is just out of the door, so don’t wait, go get your copy of the “Windows Phone Guide for Symbian Qt Application Developers” white paper and take advantage of its guidance!
Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, Sr. Technical Evangelist
@jccim – blogs.msdn.com/interoperability
[Cross-posted on the Interoperability blog]