We initially launched Windows Phone 7 Development for Absolute Beginnersback in November 2010 with the intent of providing the completely new developer with information about the basic tools necessary to build a meaningful Windows Phone app. We hadn’t expected it to become one of the most popular series we’ve ever produced on Channel 9! Time and again, we’ve heard from beginners and experienced developers alike, that the series does an amazing job of laying out Windows Phone development in a way that’s useful for developers at many different stages in the learning cycle, not just beginners.
Today, we’re excited to announce a complete refresh to this series: Windows Phone 8 Development for Absolute Beginners! Since we created our Windows Phone 7 course, Bob Tabor has published a course on C#, and this freed him up to create a completely new course entirely focused on teaching a very wide set of the key foundational concepts and developer scenarios behind delivering outstanding Windows Phone apps. This means that if you truly are brand new to software development, you really will want to watch Bob’s series on C# Fundamentalsbefore starting our Windows Phone 8 series.
We spared no expense in revamping this course. You’ll find the full sample code for the series online now on CodePlex at http://aka.ms/absbeginnerdevwp8, and we’ll also be publishing a full 419-page lab manual that documents the entire course with code samples and screenshots. We’ll update this download location when it’s available.
NOTE: the lab manual is now available.
The new course for Windows Phone 8 gives you all the basic information you need to build and publish outstanding Windows Phone apps. It will walk you through, in detail:
- Basics of installing and working with Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Phone, and the Windows Phone Emulator
- XAML layout and events for Windows Phone
- How to use many of the phone’s built in features and additional open source libraries
- Building two complete store-worthy apps
- Localization for your app
- Using mapping and location in your app
- Retrieving data from a web service using the new portable class library version of HttpClient
- Creating a background agent
We hope you enjoy this great resource! Happy coding!
Larry Lieberman
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