Charles Petzold, the author of Programming Windows has released a book about Programming Windows Phone 7, from the perspective of both the Silverlight and XNA Game Studio application models.
It’s also available in e-book form for… free! It’s a 13MB PDF that can be downloaded from Microsoft Press. Get it before they run out! 
There has been a rather large update today to content on the App Hub. Check out all the changes in the Education Roadmap. Updates are numerous, and include new samples, articles and labs covering all aspects of Windows Phone game development with XNA Game Studio.
Just in time for Halloween, we’ve also got an article on Windows Phone application tombstoning. What is this ominously-named process? How can one cope with it? Read all about it in my article: You’ve been Tombstoned!
Those of you who have recently tried to access creators.xna.com may have noticed something, well, different.
The old Creator’s Club site is, indeed gone, along with developer.windowsphone.com (the previous Windows Phone Developer portal). Both of these sites have been replaced by the App Hub, a new site featuring a cleaner, more navigable design to enable you to find the downloads, samples, tutorials, and articles you’re looking for to complete your game or application for either (or both!) Xbox 360 or Windows Phone. I, personally, like simplification!
There are also a number of new forums to explore, and the old Creator’s Club forum content seems to have made the transition intact.
Log in with your Windows LIVE ID, as before… and get to it! I look forward to seeing your creations on the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone marketplaces!
Yesterday heralded the official announcement of the availability of Windows Phone 7 devices by Microsoft, and there are a fair number of new devices that will be available—Engadget’s even posted a nicely-formatted guide to the new phones.
This is one of my favorite things about Windows Phone (and is a trait shared by Android, and to a lesser extent, Blackberry): the variety in the hardware available. It gives customers a choice in devices, tailored to suit one’s individual style. Devices exist, for instance, with slide-out keyboards (in both landscape and portrait orientations), upgraded cameras, surround-sound speakers, AMOLED screens, and even kickstands. It’ll certainly be interesting to see what additional hardware Windows Phone 7 will be paired with in the coming years.
The devices become available for purchase in North America on November 8th, and I certainly look forward to seeing what XNA Game Studio developers create with them! 
The popular tech blog Engadget recently posted a rather complete preview of what’s to come with Windows Phone 7.
I’m looking forward to this as well, and am brewing ideas for a few games on the platform.
Do give Engadget’s article a look! If you’re a game developer familiar with XNA, and especially if you’ve done any Zune HD programming, you should feel right at home developing for Windows Phone!
In fact, you can even get started now by downloading the XNA Game Studio 4.0 Beta from XNA Creator’s Club Online. It includes a Windows Phone 7 emulator, so you can get a head-start on development even before devices are available.
InputToy (also known as “Sparkles”) started as an application designed to demonstrate programming touch and accelerometer input on the Zune HD with XNA Game Studio 3.1. However, when the XNA Game Studio 4 Community Technical Preview (CTP) was released with support for the upcoming Windows Phone 7, including a built-in emulator, I felt that porting the application to Windows Phone was the next logical step.
This tutorial will provide step-by-step instructions on porting an application from the Zune HD to Windows Phone, using the existing Zune HD Sparkles application (InputToyZuneHD) as an example. The full source code for that version can be downloaded here.
This is part two of a two-part tutorial dealing with touch and accelerometer input on the Zune HD. It’s assumed that readers have already read the first part, which provides a full discussion of building the application to this point, including required prerequisites. If you haven’t read it already, see Making the Zune HD Sparkle with XNA Game Studio 3.1 – Part 1.
This part of the tutorial adds a number of GUI elements to the application, making it more complete by adding an instruction screen and a menu to manipulate the behavior of the display.
This article explores using XNA Game Studio to access the two primary forms of user input on the Zune HD: the multitouch screen, and the accelerometer. We’ll do this by building a small demo that allows the user to create sparkles by touching the screen, and to move them around by tilting the device.
Over the course of this tutorial, the following subjects will be covered:
I won’t be going over how to create a new XNA game project, nor will I describe how to add textures using the Content Pipeline. I assume that the reader has read enough about Game Studio to know how to do these things already. If you haven’t, I suggest downloading XNA Game Studio (a link is provided below) and going through the first tutorial provided in the Game Studio documentation.
News for XNA Creators!