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Windows Phone 7 training kit hits beta

Following this week's beta of Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools, Microsoft releases the beta of a training kit that teaches how to write apps for the platform.

Lance Whitney Contributing Writer
Lance Whitney is a freelance technology writer and trainer and a former IT professional. He's written for Time, CNET, PCMag, and several other publications. He's the author of two tech books--one on Windows and another on LinkedIn.
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Lance Whitney
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Developers can use the training kit to learn to write apps for Windows Phone 7.
Developers can use the training kit to learn to write apps for Windows Phone 7. Microsoft

Microsoft's beta release of its Windows Phone 7 Development Training Kit offers several new labs designed to let developers get their feet wet in the new platform.

Described Tuesday in a Microsoft blog, the new beta of the training kit keeps up with the changes found in the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools, which also hit beta status this week.

Microsoft has revamped the existing labs in the training kit and added a few new ones.

The lab dubbed "Using Windows Phone Launcher and Choosers In Your Applications" exposes the APIs that developers can tap into when writing their apps to run common tasks, such as making phone calls, sending e-mail, and snapping photos.

The lab called "Understanding the Windows Phone Application Lifecycle (handling Tombstone)" delves into "tombstoning," or what happens when when a person navigates away from an app and the OS thus ends the app's process--a necessary task since Windows Phone 7 does not support application multitasking.

The new labs include "Hello Phone," a variation of the familiar "Hello World" program that developers create when learning a new programming language. This lab helps developers learn to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phones and Expression Blend to build their apps, according to Microsoft.

The lab on "Building Your First Windows Phone Application" presents a puzzle game designed to take developers on a tour of the different stages of creating an app. The "Windows Phone Navigation and Controls" explains how to navigate among the different screens in a Windows Phone Silverlight app. And the "Game Development with XNA Framework for Windows Phone" teaches developers how to create a basic XNA game app for the phone.

Interested developers can download the training kit to install it locally or use the online edition at Microsoft's Channel 9 Web site to view session videos.