This is a Phone Gap tutorial Series in which I will create a phone gap application for each of the platforms it supports. It is mostly a journey of my own that you get to follow along on. I will start with Windows Phone and then convert it to IPhone, IPad, Android, Blackberry, Symbian. We will discuss tips and tricks along the way.
In this post, we will look at what you need to do to get started using Phone Gap using Windows Phone. The first thing you need to do is download the Phone Gap tools.
Go to http://phonegap.com and click on the Download PhoneGap button. It is currently at version 1.41
The file will be called callback-phonegap-1.4.1-0-g0d1f305.zip (of course the number will change as new updates are applied). It is called callback-phonegap because…. now take a breath here…. Nitobi, the company that create phone gap (at a hackathon… cool), was acquired by Adobe who then jointly with Nitobi donated the phone gap project to the Apache Software Foundation (ASW). This is a good thing since Adobe will continue to back the project while allowing others to continue to contribute. Now why is it called Callback you ask? Well, the name inside ASW for phone gap is Callback….. or at least it was, it has since been changed to Apache Cordova, so I assume the file name will change soon to.
So once you have downloaded and unziped the file, you will want to navigate to \callback-phonegap-1.4.1-0-g0d1f305\callback-phonegap-0d1f305\lib\windows. You will see many things in here, but we are only concerned with one right now. PhoneGapStarter.zip (We will talk about PhoneGapCustom.zip later). We want to copy this to our Visual Studio Templates folder so we can create phone gap projects in Visual Studio.
Copy the PhoneGapStarter.zip file to C:\Users\[USERNAME]\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Silverlight for Windows Phone
Now open up Visual Studio (This works with the full or express version) and go to File –> New Project
Select Visual C# –> Silverlight for Windows Phone
You should see a project template for PhoneGapStarter
Name Your project and hit OK. That will create your project.
In the next tutorial, we will walk through all off the files and the set up of your New Phonegap project.
Other Posts in this Series
(This list will automatically grow as I write them)
- Phone Gap Tutorial #3 - Reducing the load
- Phone Gap Tutorial #2–Looking Around
- Phone Gap Tutorial #1- Getting Started