Getting started

As expected, Microsoft has quite excellent tools available for Windows Phone 7 development. So far I have been quite happy with the free Windows Phone SDK (download from here). Of course for more advanced use cases you may want one of the non-free Visual Studio editions, but for my needs the free tools have been more than enough. Also MSDN documentation is good, although I find mixing desktop and mobile documentation a bit confusing at times.

So the tools are great, but how about development experience in general? I must admit that I haven’t become a huge fan of XAML. It just does not feel intuitive or clean, unlike e.g. QML. That said, it’s quite bearable and gets the job done. And once I get over defining the UI and move on to programming application behavior, all is fine. I’m no expert but C# has been pretty sweet so far.