By: John Baird
As readers of this magazine, you are all experts at certain facets of software development, be it for the desktop, the web, SQL Server and now mobile platforms. Mobile programming was a fairly arcane development arena up until the recent announcement of Windows Phone 7 (WP7). Prior to WP7, you had to become intimately familiar with the myriad platforms and form factors available and write your programs to each of those phones. With the advent of WP7, Microsoft is now controlling the hardware capabilities of the phone making it much easier to develop for these platforms. You can now also leverage existing skills in Silverlight and XNA to write your apps. But the question always remains: how do I get started and what is the best way to write for the new WP7? In a previous article, <i>CODE Magazine </i>Jan/Feb 2011, I showed you what to do to get started; now I want to show you the best way to apply what you have learned in that article. I will use Silverlight, the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, and Silverlight Unit testing to build a sample app.