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CHAPTER 1 TAKING THE METRO WITH WINDOWS PHONE
The Metro user experience introduces several new ways to present and navigate information. The
hub concept is designed to group related information together and make it easy to glance at the
most relevant information, such as your friends ’ recent social networking updates. Through the use
of panoramas and an area much larger than the actual screen, hubs allow the personas Anna and
Miles to quickly access frequently used information and updates, while still providing access to a
signifi cant volume of details and features that may be used less frequently. Although you can build
your own Panoramic views, you need to be careful that you don ’ t overuse them in cases where a
single view would be more appropriate.
DEVELOPER LANDSCAPE
Building simple applications for Windows Mobile has always been a trivial exercise. You could
simply open up Visual Studio, create a new project, and hit Debug or Run in order to see your
application run on either an emulator or a connected device. Unfortunately, over time, support
within Visual Studio and the associated .NET Compact Framework didn ’ t keep pace with
expectations in the market for rich applications that both looked good and were responsive to
the user. In order to build sophisticated applications for Windows Mobile, you had to hunt down
information on frameworks such as DirectDraw or OpenGL in the hope that they would allow you
to build an application with a rich user experience. Even then there were non - trivial issues to resolve
as different manufacturers decided not to provide driver - level support for them, or introduced
device - specifi c functionality, or worse yet, bugs.
One of the goals with Windows Phone was to address these issues and provide a platform upon
which developers could build both applications and games. The time to get up-and-running should
be minimal, and yet the tools and frameworks need to be sophisticated enough to handle the most
complex of user interfaces. Figure 1 - 11 provides a thousand - foot view of the development ecosystem
for Windows Phone developers.
Registration & Marketplace
Validation & MO/CC Billing
Certification & Business Intelligence
Publishing & Updated Management
Portal Services
Cloud
Visual Studio & Expression Blend
Windows Phone Emulator
XNA Game Studio
Samples & Documentation
Guides & Community
Packaging and Verification Tools
Tools and Support
Notifications & App Deployment
Location
Identity, Feeds, Social, and Maps
Xbox Live
Windows Azuret
Cloud Services
Silverligh & XNA
Sensors, Media, Data, & Location
Phone, Gamer Services, &
Notifications
.NET Framework Sandbox
Windows Phone / XBox / Windows 7
Runtimes
Screen
FIGURE 1 - 11
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