With TechEd Australia just over a week away I thought I’d give a quick run down of the Windows Phone 7 sessions that you should head along to. There are six sessions at TechEd Australia this year making up the Windows Phone virtual track. If you want to get started before the event, you can start with the beta of the Windows Phone tools is currently available, and can be downloaded from http://developer.windowsphone.com. Anyway, here are the sessions spread over four days, starting with an interactive theatre session during the welcome reception.
Tuesday
THGTU03 Dynamics CRM Online and Windows Phone 7: A duet made in the cloud
19:00 – 19:30 : Interactive Theatre Session : Dimaz Pramudya : 300
Dimaz Pramudya will do a quick lap around building WP7 application that integrates with Dynamics CRM Online. The demo will show how easy it is to build a service that pulls down the data from CRM Online and automatically convert them to JSON format for consumption within the WP7 app. There will be few interesting UX tips and tricks shown during the demo.
Wednesday
DEV252 Building Windows Phone 7 Applications in Silverlight
09:45 – 11:00 : Breakout Session : Peter Torr : 200
Consistent and predictable user experiences are a core feature of Windows Phone 7, and the application model is a key piece of the puzzle. Windows Phone 7 represents a new approach to smartphone UI, so come and learn how to build innovative new applications that feel right at home on the phone by taking advantage of panoramic views, page-based navigation, tombstoning, and more.
DEV359 From Phone Zero to Phone Hero in 60 minutes
17:00 – 18:15 : Breakout Session : Chris Auld, Chris Klug : 300
Join Chris Squared (Chris Auld & Chris Klug) from Intergen as they build a real Windows Phone 7 app from scratch in 60 minutes. This is a hard core, dual data projector, coding marathon. Chris and Chris will build a Windows Phone 7 series app including Windows Azure hosted push notifications, a rich Silverlight UI and partner integration. You’ll see how to take an idea from concept to the Windows Phone Marketplace in just an hour. In other words, not your general Hello World application.
Thursday
DEV354 Shake, Rattle and Roll with Windows Phone 7
09:45 – 11:00 : Breakout Session : Nick Randolph : 300
What distinguishes a Windows Phone 7 application from a regular desktop application is that it can make use of the features of the phone. In this session you’ll learn how to initiate tasks to capture photos from the camera, save a phone number, make a call and send an sms. The hardware integration goes much further with built in support for an accelerometer and FM radio tuner. When combined with the rich media aspects of Silverlight on the device, your Windows Phone 7 application will be set to keep you rocking all night long. .
DEV356 Advanced Windows Phone Services
17:00 – 18:15 : Breakout Session : Nick Randolph : 300
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.
Friday
DEV358 Windows Phone 7 + XNA. Bringing it all together for Games Development.
09:45 – 11:00 : Breakout Session : Chris Walsh : 200
Windows Phone 7 + XNA. The partnership you’ve been missing for Game Development. The XNA development platform has been around for years. First started off enabling developers to write games for the Xbox, Xbox360 & Zune devices. Now Microsoft have brought the amazing platform to Windows Phone 7. It enables developers to build extremely powerful and top class games. In this session, Chris will walk you through the constructs of the game template, and show you how to port the classic game in “Pong” to Windows Phone 7 using XNA.