I consider myself a pretty seasoned C# developer with experience in Silverlight and WP7, but I found this tutorial really confusing to follow. I can't imagine first timers learning WP7 programming from this tutorial. Lots of unexplained boilerplate code.

The intro does mention that the "real purpose" of this tutorial "is to explore some of the big new features in the 7.1 release"... So I think it's more geared towards developers with WP7 experience who want to learn what's new in Mango. (I don't mean that it necessarily does a very good job at even that, just pointing out.)

C# dev here too. I'm curious, was there something specific that you found confusing?

I can understand there's a pretty big spectrum of stuff covered here really quickly. I understood the datacontext database stuff because that's what I work with every day. But, I've avoided Silverlight/WPF successfully for years now and expected the view stuff to be a bit crazy. Lucikly I do a lot of MVC3 which makes all the Model techniques used here pretty familiar as well.

I would love to develop some WP7 apps. I've been wanting a WP7 for a long time...but Sprint only has 1 model and it's already a year old.

Something about using String.Format for internal IDs sketches me out. Is this a common practice, or do developers use URL builders instead?

.NET is strongly typed so using String.Format in the manner this example does is safe, as long as the values you're inserting are integers or guids or such.

If an app falls in the woods, and nobody buys phones to use it, does it make a sound?