Kudos to Dave Jones (no, not that Dave Jones) who's written up the developer experience of his first Windows Phone game, Brickbat, over on Gamasutra. Why choose Windows Phone as the platform, how long did it take to learn the ropes, how did the promotion and selling go, and was it a success? He addresses all those points and more.

At the end of the day, this is all you're really looking for from a first project, especially when you're coming to game development from scratch as I was. Nine months in development might seem a bit over the top for a mobile phone Breakout clone, but included in that time was learning C# and XNA from scratch and a crash course in the fundamentals of game design and programming. The end result was never likely to be anything to set the world alight - my main aim all along was just to see a project through to release, and anything else would be a bonus.

Hey, you've got to pay your dues before you pay the rent.

You can grab the free trial of Brickbat (and yes there is a trial version now) from the AAWP App Directory, and the reasoning behind a free trial, with everything else Jones learned on his journey, on Gamasutra.