So I will be starting a series of tutorials for the Microsoft XNA Framework for developing xbox live indie games, Windows Phone games and Windows PC Platform games.

I will be going through the steps of getting the tools needed for development, Developing a simple game, Some basic debugging and How to launch games on your windows phone and submitting it to the windows marketplace.

The game I will be developing in the first series will be a simple implementation of Pong. We will not make use of any advanced graphics but will become familiar with drawing graphics onto the screen and how to access the graphics device manager.

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Downloading the Tools:
We will be using the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 which can be downloaded here.

The contents of the SKD include the following:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
• Windows Phone Emulator
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Assemblies
• Silverlight 4 SDK and DRT
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Extensions for XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Microsoft Expression Blend SDK for Windows Phone 7
• Microsoft Expression Blend SDK for Windows Phone OS 7.1
• WCF Data Services Client for Window Phone
• Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows Phone

Once you start the installer it will automatically download all the components you need on your pc.

When installation has finished. Proceed to start > all programs > Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express > and launch Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone.

You should now be greeted with the following:


Proceed to File > New Project and you will have the following screen:


On the left Select Visual C# and from the list select "Windows Phone Game (4.0)".
Enter "Pong" as the project name and press ok.

You can also make a "Windows Game" but and convert it to a windows phone game later on but for these tutorials we will just use a default windows phone game setup from the start.

You will now receive a notification about which platform we want to target. Select Windows Phone OS 7.1 for this tutorial. If you are running an older version of the windows phone you may have to make a few changes later on to run it on your phone.




I will be developing this for the latest windows 7.5 (mango) but please feel free to post in the forums if you have any problems on other versions.

You will now have a default project created with an empty structure for you to start programing:



Press the green "Start Debugging" button at the top (make sure you have "windows phone emulator" selected, I will cover how to connect your windows phone later on).



Your project should compile without any errors and you should now have a blank "windows phone" emulator running with a blue screen as in the picture:



We are now ready and have everything running to start off with our development. In the next tutorial we will cover creating the paddles for pong and drawing them to the screen.