Charles Petzold

I have this vision of one day walking into a room full of programmers eager to learn about Windows Phone 7 programming. I'm empty handed, but then I pull a phone from my pocket, hook it up to the projector, and use that phone to do my entire presentation — the (now traditional) mix of slides, sample code, and incredibly useful insights.

There are still a few details to work out: I have not yet held a Windows Phone 7 device in my hands, although I have been in a room where other people have had them. And I don't think the phone will be able to run Visual Studio (although I'm eager to port XamlCruncher).

I'm not worried about getting PowerPoint because I have something totally better, or at least much smaller. I call it PhoniePoint. The product of hundreds of minutes of development time, PhoniePoint is the first presentation program written specifically for Windows Phone 7. Today I used PhoniePoint at Devscovery 2010 NYC to give my very first presentation about Windows Phone 7 programming. Here's a typical slide:

Currently in version 1E-10, PhoniePoint has a to-do list that exceeds its feature list by many orders of magnitude. However, it does have a useful feature of accomodating actual sample Silverlight apps within the slide deck. I don't think you can do that in PowerPoint. The source code includes today's presentation, the size of which is considerably inflated due to the inclusion of a video used solely to demonstrate the ability of Silverlight to adjust to changes in phone orientation.

Compiling and running PhoniePoint requires the CTP release of the Windows Phone 7 development tools available through the Windows Phone 7 development portal.