This is a very simple announcement - a free 1000 page book on Windows Phone 7 is now available to download. It is a "proper" Microsoft book and will be available in print later in the year.

Charles Petzold is well known for high quality technical books and this is no cheap give away. It's a 1000 page book covering both Silverlight and XNA development.

The downloadable version is a PDF - about 39MBytes - and so should be readable on almost any machine or eBook reader. Although it has to be said that it hasn't been optimised for use on an ebook reader and the color markup on the code makes it difficult to read on a mono-chrome reader.  The code is available as a separate zip file.

You can download the PDF from:

Programming Windows Phone 7

One can only assume that this is another effort by Microsoft to make sure that we get on with the job of creating apps for Phone 7. The book will be available as two paper editions later in the year - one on Silverlight and one on XNA.

Further Reading

Getting started with Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 - Snakes on a Phone Part 1

Windows Phone 7 - using the Pivot control

Windows Phone 7 - using the Panorama control

Windows Phone 7 - the Bing Maps Control