Scope of This Book

This book targets Windows Phone 8 (Apollo). Although you see some examples incorporating XNA for audio and media, this book’s focus is squarely on XAML for Windows Phone. The book covers all main areas of the topic in a deep, yet easily comprehensible way, using practical examples with a real-world context. The goal is to provide you with concepts and techniques that will help you to design and develop well-engineered and robust Windows Phone apps.

Throughout this book you see a small number of techniques and custom code applied to make developing phone apps easier. It is not the intention to make what you will learn in the book harder to reach; on the contrary, the techniques are tried and tested approaches that, when they become familiar, will help you build more testable and maintainable apps that can be potentially ported to other platforms. The competition between apps on the Windows Phone platform has intensified as the number of apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace has increased dramatically. This competition not only brings with it a “long tail,” where independent developers find evermore niche categories to create apps for, but also requires apps competing in the more popular categories to increase their feature sets. As apps become more complex, maintainability comes to the fore, and greater attention to managing complexity is required.

This book is not a book for those without at least some knowledge of XAML. Although there is considerable reference material for some essential XAML infrastructure, included within these chapters are advanced topics, such as the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern (MVVM). In fact, most sample apps follow the MVVM pattern. The concepts and techniques used throughout the book are described in Chapter 2, “Fundamental Concepts in Windows Phone Development.” Do not worry if some of these approaches seem foreign to you; by the end of the book they will be second nature.

Wherever possible, you are provided with tips and techniques that go beyond the topic, and you will frequently find content not easily found elsewhere. A substantial amount of custom code is provided that extends the Windows Phone SDK to support real app scenarios.