Windows Phone 7 Development Internals: Covers Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.5 Book Review

This book starts with a great overview of the entire Windows Phone landscape. The author does a great job of introducing the development lifecycle and the anatomy of a basic windows phone application. After the initial chapter the author continues in Part I Building Blocks to lay a solid foundation for the rest of the book. The book has a total of four parts. I have listed each part below with the chapters they include. Part I Building Blocks Vision and Architecture UI Core Controls Data Binding and Layer Decoupling Touch UI Part II Application Model Application Model Navigation State and Storage Diagnostics and Debugging Part III Extended Services Phone Services Media Services Web and Cloud Push Notifications Security Go to Market Part IV Version 7.5 Enhancements Multi-Tasking and Fast App Switching Enhanced Phone Services Enhanced Connectivity Features Data Support Framework Enhancements Tooling Enhancements In Part II Application Model the author digs into the guts of the way applications should behave and how to figure out what is going wrong through diagnostics and debugging. The third part of the book shows us how we can integrate the phone's built in features into our applications. It includes coverage of the launchers and choosers, the audio and video APIs, web services, the Web Browser control, OData, Bing Maps, Deep Zoom, Azure, Sky Drive, the push notification architecture, and a ton of performance tips. The last part of the book covers the 7.5 enhancements and there are a ton of them. Some of them include multi-tasking, background agents, camera manipulation, and local database support. The thing I like most about this book is that the author covers the architecture and design of the different features he covers. He makes extensive use of diagrams to give you an over all picture of the topics being covered, and then he digs into the details. He backs up the details he covers with tons of code samples. The code samples that accompany this book are very well organized and usable. The only thing that could have made this book better is to have it printed in color. After reading several recently that were in color I got kind of spoiled. I can't ding the book for that though. I think this book is good for the experienced C# developer looking to begin Windows Phone development as well as experienced Windows Phone developers. The book makes a great cover to cover read as well as a great reference. All in all, if you are a Windows Phone developer, you need to have this book by your side.

Windows Phone 7 Development Internals: Covers Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.5