After Windows Phone 7.1 SDK was installed, a list of Silverlight-based WP project templates will be available in Visual Studio 2010. Then you are ready to create your WP application using Sliverlight(XAML/C#). Yes WP just looks like a special Sliverlight client. You can simply test your WP application simply by the built-in emulator.
I got a Samsung Focus WP handset. I created a simple app and hoped easily to deploy it to the handset device. I thought it's trivial since I found "Windows Phone Device" option right beside the debug button on VS2010 menu. But it's not as easy as I thought.
I connected the handset to the dev machine with a USB cable, then click run with "Windows Phone Device" option. Bingo I got an error telling me that Zune software is not installed. Why deploying a WP app has business with the notorious Zune? Just copying the bad ideal of tethering iPhone on iTune from Apple? Is iZune or iTone a better name for that? No idea what MS is thinking about. Anyway download a 100M Zune package, install it in the dev machine and reboot the machine.
Ready to deploy my own app to the external handset right? The answer is NO! I got another error "Failed to connect to device as it is developer locked". Fantastic the Samsung phone is "locked". Is it locked by MS, Samsung or the carrier? I don't know. But it doesn't look like a carrier lock as iPhone's case.
To unlock a smartphone device, you will have to register a App Hub account, basically a WP/XBOX developer membership costing $99 a year. By paying a hundred bucks, you are eligible to unlock three physical smartphone devices the most. Who figured out the number of 3, instead of 5, 10 or whatever? Guess people from WP team are quite sure that there won't be more than three WP devices around you as a developer. It’s just ridiculous.
So you have a smartphone device, and you want to do some homebrew stuff for yourself and don't want to pay $99/year fee, what should you do? No luck at all! You may end up to an Android device.
WP market share is less than 5 percent, almost ignorable. It's so low that developers are just not willing to work on it. Should MS just make WP development a bit easier in such case? Sigh...
