Абструс!

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.

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