I'm not sure where I was last year when the tutorial, below, was released, but it's wonderful.  Making Windows Phone 8 apps is now pretty much as easy for me as Windows Forms.  In part, this is, I think, b/c there's so little extra to do with a Windows Phone app to make a UI.  If you're shooting for a small screen, there's only so much to do.

I'm finally moving from the headless side of my Mono app, and was, since my best laptop is Windows-only, debating whether I should hack around on an Android app via Xamarin Studio when I was mobile or try to pick up Windows Phone again.  I'd like to concentrate on iOS, since everyone makes it sound like all the money for an app-sales driven company is on that platform, but then pick another to play around with and experiment with questionable features.  (I'd also like to make a good PC app with the same codebase, but that's another story entirely, I think.)

Looks like I'm going to save the $300 Xamarin requires to play on Android and stick to Windows for now.

Anyhow, here it is -- an excellent, free to access video (and text) tutorial series to get you from the cradle to the Windows Store.

Windows Phone 8 Development for Absolute Beginners | Channel 9:

Bob Tabor (LearnVisualStudio.NET) and Clint Rutkas (Microsoft/Channel9) team up to deliver this 11 hour Windows Phone 8 Development for Absolute Beginners series! Not only will you learn the absolute basics of installing and working with Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Phone and the Emulator, but you'll also learn XAML layout and events, how to utilize many of the Phone's built in features and additional open-source libraries.

In other news, it's been lots of fun making a quick and dirty console client on top of the codebase.  I've always enjoyed doing some WriteLines and ReadLines to test out code, but this is the first time I've delved into Console's SetCursorPosition, SetWindowSize, and ReadKey.  It's pretty old school stuff, and you figure out why elm and pine made you use other text editors to compose your email pretty quickly, but as far as the time invested for the amount of issues in your code, or issues in your app's flow, that it exposes are insanely useful.  It's hard not to encourage folks to make one before getting too far down "real" UI design as a matter of standard practice.

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