News

Read original post by Angelina Gambo and Hamid Mahmood at Windows 8 App Developer Blog

Fast and fluid animations bring apps to life. In Windows 8 Consumer Preview, you will notice that animations are an integral part of the user experience. When you log in to your PC, the items in the Start menu animate in. When you launch an immersive app or zoom into the Start menu, the experience is enriched with a smooth animation. Animations can tell the user what happened as a result of a specific action. This visual feedback instills user confidence in the app’s responsiveness. Even a simple addition or deletion of an item in a list can be made fluid, modern, and informative using a subtle animation (as seen in Jensen Harris’s //build/ session, around minute 25:00).

Read original post by Peter Kuhn at Mister Goodcat

I've released version 2.0 of my open source component "Your Last About Dialog". This major new release adds full styling support to the about page, which gives you complete control over the visual appearance of the component. This not only includes simple details like foreground and background colors, font sizes and styles, but also much more sophisticated things like the possibility to add page transitions from the Silverlight Toolkit, or control the visibility of the system tray and other details.

Here are all news published on SilverlightShow.net on May 1st, 2012:

• New SilverlightShow article: Windows 8 and the future of XAML Part 6: Tiles, toasts and badges
• Video: Getting Started with RadBreadCrumb for Silverlight and WPF
• Using Visual Studio LightSwitch To Orchestrate A Unity 3D Game
• Join Windows Phone Bar Camp in London, UK, May 19
• Getting The Flights Above You, And Much More, On Windows Phone, With WolframAlpha
• Microsoft's First Windows Phone Partner Just Bailed
• Introducing the jQuery Mobile Metro Theme
• Four ways we’re improving Marketplace
• Unblock Files in Windows 8 using PowerShell and Registry

Gill Cleeren has just released part 6 from his SilverlightShow article series on Windows 8 and XAML. As usual, the whole series will be released as a SilverlightShow ebook when completed, so stay tuned on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to find out when the ebook is out. Read part 6

Welcome to part 6 already in this Windows 8 series. Since the goal of this articles is bringing you in touch with all the important aspects of Windows 8 development, we need to dive into tiles.

Tiles are therefore the main topic of this very article. If you’re coming from a Windows Phone 7 background, the concept of tiles is probably already familiar to you. However, Windows 8 brings quite a few new things to the table, including the concept of badges. Toasts are also covered here; conceptually, these already existed in Windows Phone 7 development as well but have been adapted for use in a Windows 8 environment.

Watch the video at TelerikTV

In this video we'll explore the basics of RadBreadCrumb. This will cover the overall structure of the control, setting a root item, and what properties you will need to get the hierarchical display showing and functional.

Read the original post by Michael Washington at LightSwitch Help Website

Visual Studio LightSwitch in Visual Studio 11 allows you to communicate directly with the LightSwitch business layer (business rules, custom code, security), though OData. This allows you to use LightSwitch as the orchestrating control for any enterprise application or deployment.

In this example, we will demonstrate, using Visual Studio LightSwitch, an application to monitor and send messages to a Unity 3D online game.

This month,on May 19th, WPUG will be dropping its standard format and will instead be hosting a full day, bar camp style, event for experienced Windows Phone developers.

This is different from the dev camp events that Microsoft and Nokia have been running. Those events are focused on those who are new to the platform. This event is for those who have already released apps. That's why we're saying it's for "experienced" developers.

What constitutes an "experienced Windows Phone developer"? 
We think it's someone who has at least one app in the marketplace.

Rather than spend the day learning how to get started. WPBarCamp is about sharing the experiences of those who have already released apps so they can go on to make more, better apps in the future.

There will be a couple of pre-arranged presentations to start the day, but the majority of the day will be run in true bar camp style with attendees sharing lessons, tips and giving demos of their app.

We'd love all developers who have released apps and are keen to share their experiences to attend but spaces are limited so early registration is recommended.

Details:
Where: Vibe Bar London
When: Saturday May 19th 09:30 - 16:00
Cost: free (lunch included)

More details and registration: http://wpbarcamp.eventbrite.com/ 

What is WPUG?

The Windows Phone User Group (WPUG) was the first and is the longest running user group focused exclusively on designing and developing for Windows Phone.
It exists to help those interested in developing for Windows Phone to learn from and with each other.
The group has held monthly meetings in London every month since July 2010 and has spawned two offshoot groups in Cardiff and Manchester.

For more information about WPBarCamp or WPUG, contact Matt Lacey (Organiser) via matt@wpug.net 

Read the original article by Den Delimarsky at DZone

The reason I like WolframAlpha is because it is a "knowledge engine" that can give quick insights in a multitude of topics. Specifically, the most interesting part for me is related getting a list of flights that are currently above me. So here is how to track flights that are above you from inside a Windows Phone application, with the help of WolframAlpha API. Of course, this sample is built in such a way that you can easily adapt it to any input query - I just like tracking flights.

Read the original article at Business Insider

LG says it has no plans to make any Windows Phones in the near future.
The company told the Korea Herald that “The total unit[s] of Windows Phone sold in the global market is not a meaningful figure,” and said that it's taking a step back from Microsoft's platform, although it will still do some research and development related to the platform. The news was reported earlier by The Verge.