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Book Review: Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 Development Internals

Covers Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.5
By Tad Anderson
Article Rating:
August 6, 2012 11:45 AM EDT
Reads:
 2,370
This book starts with a great overview of the entire Windows Phone landscape. The author does a great job of introducing the development lifecycle and the anatomy of a basic windows phone application.

After the initial chapter the author continues in Part I Building Blocks to lay a solid foundation for the rest of the book. The book has a total of four parts. I have listed each part below with the chapters they include.

Part I Building Blocks
Vision and Architecture
UI Core
Controls
Data Binding and Layer Decoupling
Touch UI

Part II Application Model
Application Model
Navigation State and Storage
Diagnostics and Debugging

Part III Extended Services
Phone Services
Media Services
Web and Cloud
Push Notifications
Security
Go to Market

Part IV Version 7.5 Enhancements
Multi-Tasking and Fast App Switching
Enhanced Phone Services
Enhanced Connectivity Features
Data Support
Framework Enhancements
Tooling Enhancements

In Part II Application Model the author digs into the guts of the way applications should behave and how to figure out what is going wrong through diagnostics and debugging.

The third part of the book shows us how we can integrate the phone's built in features into our applications. It includes coverage of the launchers and choosers, the audio and video APIs, web services, the Web Browser control, OData, Bing Maps, Deep Zoom, Azure, Sky Drive, the push notification architecture, and a ton of performance tips.

The last part of the book covers the 7.5 enhancements and there are a ton of them. Some of them include multi-tasking, background agents, camera manipulation, and local database support.

The thing I like most about this book is that the author covers the architecture and design of the different features he covers. He makes extensive use of diagrams to give you an over all picture of the topics being covered, and then he digs into the details.

He backs up the details he covers with tons of code samples. The code samples that accompany this book are very well organized and usable.

The only thing that could have made this book better is to have it printed in color. After reading several recently that were in color I got kind of spoiled. I can't ding the book for that though.

I think this book is good for the experienced C# developer looking to begin Windows Phone development as well as experienced Windows Phone developers. The book makes a great cover to cover read as well as a great reference.

All in all, if you are a Windows Phone developer, you need to have this book by your side.
Windows Phone 7 Development Internals: Covers Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.5

Published August 6, 2012 – Reads 2,370
Copyright © 2012 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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Tad Anderson has been doing Software Architecture for 16 years and Enterprise Architecture for the past few.