Windows Phone 7 dev: C# or silverlight for a simple app?

Question

I'm about to hire a programmer to develop Windows Phone 7 apps.

The current app that shall be developed is quite simple.

• The app will download content from a Web-API.
• There are two lists to select content.
• There is a single item content page.
• Users can rate the content and upload photos.

The screens will be produced by our artist. I am pretty sure that most of the available programmers haven't touched WP7 development yet.

Now the questions are:

1. What technology is suitable for this kind of app?
2. What technology requires less research, learning and production time?
3. Do you already have experience of limitations of silverlight compared to C#? (I am also thinking of future projects)
4. My guess is that silverlight programmers are more experienced in UI programming than C# coders. Do you feel the same way?

Answer 1

Ok, you're confusing technologies.

• C# is a programming language
• Silverlight is a framework and a runtime - you write Silverlight applications using C# (or VB or, possibly, other things - though you have to get creative).

If you want to write applications (apps) to run on a Windows Phone 7 device you almost certainly will write in C#, your choice is between Silverlight or XNA for the framework and from your description I'd guess that Silverlight would be the sensible choice. There are no other options for apps, though you could write a web based application tailored to the screen size.

Silverlight's UI is created using XAML and is a subset of WPF.

To answer the question, if you've got C# devs familiar with the .NET framework then you're at least halfway there. Yes, Silverlight is the right solution. Silverlight developers are, for the most part, C# developers - but C# devs familiar with XAML and UI development - though you can put Expression Blend in the hands of a suitable designer and have them to the UI.

I'd suggest that you want to have your team understanding and taking advantage of MVVM as defined by Microsoft because that's how they feel that Silverlight dev should be doen and therefore they've put things in place to make that possible.