Chapter 1, Setting up Windows Phone Development with F#, is all about setting the stage for Windows Phone development with F#. Here we will take a look at the Windows Phone platform, the F# language, and the prerequisites required to start developing applications.

Chapter 2, F# Windows Phone Project Overview, is all about becoming familiar with the different project templates available for developing Windows Phone applications. We will decipher each project template and understand what each project type contains and how to work with each type. We will also look at some of the item templates required for app development.

Chapter 3, Working with Windows Phone Controls, helps us understand the controls provided by the platform. We will look at more than 10 controls provided by this platform. We will take one control and walk you through how to work with that control. By the end of this chapter you will be familiar with the "toys" you can use to play on this platform.

Chapter 4, Windows Phone Screen Orientations, introduces you to a concept called orientation and shows you how to deal with it in your applications. Since a phone is a handheld device, the user has all freedom to turn the phone upside down or rotate it left or right. This changes the orientation of your application, and as the developer, it is your responsibility to react to this. This chapter will help you understand the different orientations and how to code for handling orientation changes.

Chapter 5, Windows Phone Gesture Events, teaches you how to read the gestures performed by the user in your application. We will take a look at what gestures are and what gesture events are supported by the platform. We will also look at how to handle gesture events in your applications.

Chapter 6, Windows Phone Navigation, is all about understanding how to allow users to move from one screen to another screen in your application. We will look at the Windows Phone navigation model and different techniques to enable navigation.

Chapter 7, Windows Phone and Data Access, helps you understand how to store and access data on the Windows Phone platform since one of the fundamental aspects of any application is data. We will try to understand the different data source options available on the platform.

Chapter 8, Launchers and Choosers, introduces a whole set of built-in applications, also known as Launchers and Choosers. Launchers and Choosers help us make use of the built-in apps or call the built-in apps right from our own apps.

Chapter 9, Windows Phone Sensors, introduces you to multiple sensors supported by Windows Phone that allow apps to determine orientation and motion of the device. With sensors, it is possible to develop apps that make the physical device itself an input. Typical uses of these sensors are for games, location-aware apps, and so on. The Windows Phone platform provides APIs to retrieve data from the individual sensors.

In order to work through this book and to learn Windows Phone 7.5 Application Development with F#, you will need to have the following software:

If you know F# and are interested in developing for the Windows Phone 7.5 platform, this book is for you. It gives you a jump-start to developing Windows Phone 7.5 apps using F#.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "This contains the launch point, which is App.XAML."

A block of code is set as follows:

public AppHost()
    {
      // Standard Silverlight initialization
      InitializeComponent();
      app = new WindowsPhoneApp.App(this);
    }

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on OK once you are done with naming the application."

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