I have previously mentioned that an “draft” of this book “Programing Windows Phone 7 Series” by Charles Petzold was available for download. Thankfully Microsoft (MSPress) are now giving away the finished eBook (with the slightly shorter name) in PDF format.

If you are interested in what is involved in programming for Windows Phone the this would be an excellent start as it covers all the basics (and the hard stuff).

For more information go to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/10/28/free-ebook-programming-windows-phone-7-by-charles-petzold.aspx

Session Description: Building Windows Phone 7 applications is all about combining the power of Silverlight on the device with services in the cloud. You can offload long running processes to a worker process hosted in Windows Azure, and receive a push notification when it completes. Your application can also leverage the location services to provide more context rich information. This session walks through how you can consumer a number of cloud-based services such as Messenger Connect, Windows Azure storage and OData WCF Data Services from within your Windows Phone 7 application. Of course, this wouldn’t be complete without the mandatory discussion on how to handle connectivity issues, such as caching and synchronization..

Speaker(s): Nick Randolph
Event: Tech·Ed Australia

Source: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Australia/DEV356

Jump to 2:30 to the stuff about Microsoft…

Charlie Kindel recently blogged that Windows Phone 7 will officially not support Windows Mobile applications.

For us, the cost of going from good to great is a clean break from the past. To enable the fantastic user experiences you’ve seen in the Windows Phone 7 Series demos so far we’ve had to break from the past. To deliver what developers expect in the developer platform we’ve had to change how phone apps were written. One result of this is previous Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series.

However all is not lost for existing Windows Mobile developers as the Windows Phone 7 series device will support familiar technologies such as:

• .NET
• Silverlight
• XNA platform
• Microsoft’s developer tools
• Web 2.0 standards

In any case more information about the entire development process for WinPhone 7 will be announced at MIX 2010 in less than a week. So stay tuned for more info…

Source: Charlie Kindel on Windows Phone Development : Different Means Better with the new Windows Phone Developer Experience