Preface

Welcome to the second in the series of Windows Phone Unleashed titles. This book extends the previous book, Windows Phone 7.5 Unleashed, and provides new content covering the terrific new features of the Windows Phone 8 SDK. The Windows Phone 8 SDK builds upon the strong foundation of the previous SDK for creating XAML-based apps. If you read Windows Phone 7.5 Unleashed, you will find much of the content familiar. The content has, however, been updated across the board to cover changes in the 8.0 SDK, of which there are many. You also will find seven new chapters covering the new features of the 8.0 SDK.

Although the scope of this book remains squarely on building XAML-based apps, there have been some major changes to the other UI technologies supported by Windows Phone 8. The new SDK still enables you to build XNA UI apps for Windows Phone 7.1 devices, but support has been discontinued for Windows Phone 8 apps. And although Windows Phone 7.1 apps can be downloaded from the Windows Phone Marketplace and run on Windows Phone 8 devices, Windows Phone 7.1 apps cannot use the new features found in the 8.0 SDK. For high-performance games, Microsoft now encourages the use of Direct3D and C++ for native code, which was not available in Windows Phone 7.1. Although XNA is no longer directly supported for developing Windows Phone 8 apps, you can use third-party frameworks, such as MonoGame (www.monogame.net), to create XNA-based WP8 apps. However, this is outside the scope of this book.

As Microsoft continues to converge its various platforms, the Windows Phone SDK now contains some APIs that overlap with Windows 8’s WinRT. Windows Phone does not inherit all these new APIs, and in fact, has its own new set of partially overlapping APIs known as WinPRT. No prizes for guessing what the ‘P’ stands for.

The environmental requirements for developing Windows Phone 8 apps are now restricted to Windows 8 x64 and Visual Studio 2012. And Windows Phone 8 apps do not run on older devices running Windows Phone 7.1. You can, however, develop Windows Phone 7.1 apps using the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK.