News

Top 5 SilverlightCream news for May 7-13, 2012:

• Metro style applications – designing for the user
• Silverlight ViewModel Tests
• Learn jQuery Part1: Introduction to jQuery
• Connecting to WCF RIA Services in a Windows 8 Metro Style App using Upshot.js and Knockout.js
• Part 87 - Windows Phone - Important Design Guidelines
  

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Read original post by Matthijs Krempel at the Windows Phone 7 Developer Blog

Mark Monster kiddingly commented on my last post that a continuum transition in combination with the turnstile, would be awesome. As I always take things like feedback drop dead serious (not really, just thought it was a good idea), I decided to give it a go.

Like any good developer, my quest began with a bing search, which lead me to this post: http://benjii.me/2011/11/continuum-transition-for-windows-phone-silverlight-toolkit/

I have integrated Ben’s solution into the toolkit and completely rewrote the rest to make it fit with the turnstile transition.

Read original post by Paul Thurrott at the SuperSite for Windows

The Start screen is the face of the Metro environment in Windows 8 and the controversial replacement for the application launching capabilities of the Start menu from previous Windows versions. A full-screen experience, this interface is populated with live tiles representing Metro-style apps, desktop applications, web sites, libraries and folder locations, and other items.

Read original post by Alex Feldman at IEBlog

Sharing a link to a Web page is a common activity on the PC, and it gets better with IE10 on Windows 8. One of the new features on Windows 8 is the Share charm, which allows you to seamlessly send content between apps on your PC. Previously, if you wanted to share an interesting article with your friend, or post a funny picture on your blog, you’d copy the link from the address bar, switch to a different site or app, and then paste it. Now, with the Windows 8 Share charm, you can share directly from the browser without ever leaving your current page.

Read original post by Erkki Nokso-Koivisto at Vihrearobotti.com

In this blog entry we will create simple 3d game/tech demo with Sunburn Engine. This one is inspired by some of that pastel shaded demo stuff made for Amiga 500 in 90'ties. And one warning - this is my first dive to 3d stuff - so I beware of huge amount of errors I've in here :)

Read original post by Michael Stroh at Windows Phone Blog

The official LinkedIn app for Windows Phone just hit Marketplace. Download it now

The free app lets you tap all the most popular features of the popular business social network. Search for jobs, see real-time updates from your connections, stay up-to-date with LinkedIn professional groups, and follow company and industry news.

Read original post by Johan Lindfors at Coderox

I’m still a bit surprised in finding applications on Windows Phone 7 that doesn’t take into consideration that the user might have either the dark or light theme enabled based on personal preferences. If your app is only supposed to work in one theme, then using Jeff Wilcox tool Phone Theme Manager helps a lot (it’s also available on NuGet, simply install with “install-package PhoneThemeManager”). But what if your app also want to leverage a background image that might be downloaded from the internet or specified by the user. Since images might be very light or dark this might impact the user experience with the foreground color blending into the image, but there are a couple of solutions to that as well.

Read original post by Igor Ralic at Igrali

This year, it was my first time ever to experience what it means to speak at a conference. I had a session at the Microsoft WinDays technology conference in Croatia, and I talked about Windows Phone multimedia and sensors. It was (and still is) an interesting combination of two topics that have much in common. Therefor it made sense to cover those in one session, which ended with augmented reality and a demo of a small augmented reality app (it was actually a video, because it’s difficult to demo augmented reality during the session because it’s necessary to move around). I will write more about multimedia and sensors in my next few blog posts, but for now I’ll just show you the video and how I created the app using Geo Augmented Reality Toolkit.

Read original post by Den Delimarsky at DZone

Internally, a lot of images are referenced as resources. For example, the icons you see for stock OS applications are, in fact, local resources that can also be referenced from your own application.

Let’s start with the most basic approach – setting your application icon to be an OS resource. Open the WMAppMaifest.xml and find the IconPath and BackgroundImageURI nodes. If you are reading this blog, I am assuming that you already have the knowledge of what each node represents, but [...]