Playing around with Windows Phone 7 SDK CTP April Refresh

imageBefore we prepared tonight's dinner (more accurately : the wife cook and I do the dished), I spent a few minutes in front of the computer and twiddled around with Windows Phone 7 SDK CTP April Refresh’¦Just as what I've heard, it is a full blown OS running on an emulated mobile device. It even came with IE.

The project template

The current April 2010 CTP comes with 3 Windows Mobile Silverlight project templates: WP App, WP List App and WP Class Library.

The WP List App shows how you could do simple navigation hierarchy along with transition animation. 

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I was pleasantly surprise to see how the project template is constructed. There's a folder dedicated to ViewModels classes. Looks like Microsoft is pushing MVVM with WP. The VM is nicely implemented as INotifyPropertyChange.

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Silverlight Goodness

I thought what else could be better to test Silverlight on Windows Phone other than creating a project that uses Farseer physics engine.

I seem to be able to get one of the Farseer Silverlight simple demo in less than an hour. I didn't have to do anything much other than: correcting the casing of the keyboard enums (System.Windows.Input.Key.ENTER to System.Windows.Input.Key.Enter), changing System.Windows.Controls.UserControl to PhoneApplicationPage  and voila ’¦

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The mouse pick spring responded beautifully on the emulator (and it seem to react to multi touch too, at one point I saw multiple mouse pick springs ..or was it a glitch?).

I think next up for me is to play around with PhysicsHelper, seems like these guys have simplified a way to work with Farseer. It allows the translation from Silverlight objects directly into Farseer physics objects!