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