BANGALORE, INDIA: There are a ton of new mobile platforms out there iPhone, Android, Symbian and a few more. The first two have really taken off due to the availability of lots of apps in their respective App Stores. Microsoft's own mobile phone OS "Windows Mobile" has been stagnating for a while now, even though it had a great development platform. However, Microsoft has not really given up the race. Its upcoming Windows Phone 7 platform and the 'Metro' UI based on the Zune HD interface has been getting mostly rave reviews from whoever has played with the devices and software till now. Not only does it bring a completely new paradigm to the interface over the much-used icon based format, it also doubles up as a great development platform that can be used quite easily.

This article series will delve into the world of Windows Phone 7 (WP7, in short) development. We'll try to develop a real-world application over the coming months in this article that will explore all the different new features that are available in the platform. This part of the series starts off with an introduction to the platform itself and the setting up of the development environment.

Creating your first WP7 project in VS2010.

Windows Phone 7 Development Platform
The Windows Phone 7 platform allows developers to create applications in two different ways:

Using Silverlight: This is the primary way that apps will be developed for WP7 and consists of the application written in ?Silverlight ? Microsoft's XAML based application development platform. The Silverlight available in WP7 is a special version built upon the Silverlight 3 with some phone specific additions made available. The developer will also get access to a large number of phone SDK calls that will let him perform some common tasks quite easily.

Using XNA: This is meant primarily for developers who are creating games for the WP7 platform. Not only will it allow more direct access to the graphics and sound hardware in the phone, it also has the ability to access the Games Hub (more about this a ?little later) and be able to synchronize the same game across the phone, PC and Xbox 360. In this series we will be looking only at the Silverlight apps development for the phone.