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! 
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 Both of these sites have been replaced by the App Hub, a new site featuring a cleaner, more navigable design to enable you to find the downloads, samples, tutorials, and articles you’re looking for to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.
