Creating the Windows Phone app

Ok, with all of our tools installed, (and our phone unlocked - because we will run the app on the phone too) we can start to put together our app.  Fire up Visual Studio 2010.  Select File - New - Project.  Then select the "Windows Phone Panorama Application" template.  This template will give us a very nice base for our application.



Let's give our app a nice and meaningful name, something like:  MyPocketTechEd (since that is what we are creating:  an app that puts all of the up to the minute TechEd data in our pocket.).  Click Ok, and the shell of our app is created for us with the Panorama template.  Ensure that you selected "Windows Phone Emulator" as the target and then click F5. will bring up the emulator, and you'll see the panels that are contained within the template.  Our application should look like this for now:

You can scroll down, scroll to the second set of items, etc.  This is great, with very little effort on our part, we were able to create the basics for our app.

Coming next:  Changing styles, images, and text.  Then we'll be on to populating the app with data from the TechEd odata feeds.  I'll update this post with this next part as soon as I can (hopefully withing the next few days.)

Tim

TechEd scheduler for Windows Phone and Silverlight - Part 1

Ok, even though I want to create a really nice app using the Portable Class Library, MVVM Light, and other tools to be able to have my app accessible from multiple places, we have to start somewhere...so, I am starting with a plain old WinPhone 7 app that directly consumes the TechEd odata feed.  I'll then build this simple app out into something cooler in subsequent posts.  But, for now, let's start with the WinPhone7 app, and put the TechEd schedule on our phone...instead of on our lanyard.  :)

To get started on building the Windows Phone app to consume the TechEd North America 2011 odata feed, I installed the following:

• You can use any version of Visual Studio that you prefer, but I have Visual Studio 2010 Professional with the .NET Framework 4.0.30319 SP1 installed.  Here's a link to the express edition.
• Windows Phone Developer Tools
• Open Data Protocol .NET / SL / SP7 Libraries 
• Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio
• Silverlight Toolkit

Once you have those installed, you can move on to the steps below to see how each piece of the app was built:

• Creating the Windows Phone app
• Connecting to the odata feed to get our data for TechEd
• Putting it all together

The above posts will get us to something useful for viewing all of the readonly feeds on speakers, tracks, presentations, etc.  But, we want to be able to create a smart schedule that we can follow when we are onsite.  And, if there's time, let's also add viewing some videos on our app too (from TechEd's past).  The following posts cover this added functionality:

• Creating a smart scheduler
• Adding in videos to our app

TechEd North America 2011

I will be at TechEd in Atlanta in May and am looking forward to meeting others that are interested in Windows Phone and XNA development.  I really enjoy going to TechEd to learn from what others in the industry are doing and to get access to the product teams from Microsoft.  My TechEd profile is public if you want to add me as a contact.

TechEd scheduler for Windows Phone and Silverlight

I just started working on an app to setup my schedule of events at TechEd.  Instead of just creating a WinPhone app that calls into the TechEd odata feed directly and simply list out the speakers, events, sessions, etc.  I am creating an app using MVVM Lite and the Portable Class Library so that I can make the app available on the phone and within a Silverlight app.  The app will allow you to create your session schedule and, if time permits, I might add in some "social" aspects to the app as well to plan your "after session" fun.