Two step (in 15 parts) guide to using Microsoft Ads in your Windows Phone 7 Apps

Urmila Singhal's blog - Displaying Ads on Windows Phone 7 apps – The Basics

"Post 1: Displaying Ads on Windows Phone 7 apps – The Basics

Microsoft Ads system has made it extremely easy to monetize your Windows Phone 7 Silverlight or XNA apps. In just a few simple steps, you can start displaying contextual ads in your app. In addition, the documentation team has done a tremendous job in writing very detailed and great information. This post has a lot of content copy-pasted from the help file that came with the Ad Control SDK. The purpose of this post is to quickly highlight the major steps you need to follow without going through all the documentation and get up and running as fast as possible. (Thank you again for writing such great content).

There are just 2 simple steps in getting your app up and running with Microsoft Ads:

Download the latest Ad Control SDK from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=b0f00afc-9709-4cc2-ba2c-57728db6cbd6 and install it. The current version at the time of this writing is 5.1.0.166 (dated 3/4/2011). Default values for the installation are fine. The latest version of the Ad Control SDK allows you to build your app and show ads in test mode. This ensures that you are productive in less than ½ hour before you need to on-board with pubCenter.

Integrate the AdControl into an Application Using the Visual Studio 2010 Visual Designer. The following steps are a guide for using the Visual Studio 2010 Visual Designer to integrate advertising into Windows Phone 7 applications. In a later tutorial we will discuss how to programmatically add the control to different pages and the best practices surrounding that.

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One of these days (when I can finally get a WP7 device from Verizon) I 'm going to get off my butt and start in on some WP7. While some of what I'll do will be free, I'd also like to do some ad support stuff too. If I can earn a few pennies toward helping me support/improve and app, then cool. Also my thinking is that if an app is going to cost me to run it, say due to cloud service costs, etc, then I need to generate some funds to balance that (i.e. it's got to be revenue neutral at least or my DFO will kill me...lol ;) 

Anyway... This article shows how easy it can be to add ads to your WP7 app. Looks almost painfully easy...