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! 
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.
