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This review is for the book 'Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Cookbook', and has been submitted by a member of the Windows Phone 7 User Group - a user group supported by SilverlightShow.

We support user groups with books, swag, events promotion, free event passes and others. Contact us to get support for your user group. 

Interested in this book? Get it for free by tweeting our next webinar Leveraging Windows Azure for the Windows Phone Developer using tag #webinarsilverlightshow. Three of you will get a free ebook copy provided by Packt Publishing. Tweet this webinar now!

 

This book is another in the ever growing number offering an introduction to Windows Phone development. This one takes a slightly different approach to others I’ve read by opting for a “cookbook” style where it aims to provide a collection of “recipes” which the reader can apply to their apps.

The book starts out well by encouraging developers to work with Expression Blend (which is something most developers would benefit from) and begins with helping the reader understand the available controls before showing how to create simple animations and behaviours.

Guess how many people use Live Services? 500 million plus! And when our applications connect to the same services, they start feeling right at home with what our users are already used to. Microsoft recently opened the Live Connect APIs, along with some SDKs for 3rd party applications on desktop/web/mobile platforms to leverage the cloud offerings from Live Services. In this short article, we take a look at how we could get started using the Live Connect API from our Windows Phone applications and interact with SkyDrive storage through the new Live SDK.

To contact me directly please visit my blog at http://michaelcrump.net/ or through twitter at http://twitter.com/mbcrump.

This article is Part 10 of the series “10 Laps around Silverlight 5.” If you have missed any other section then please see the Roadmap below.

To refresh your memory on what Silverlight is:

Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing Rich Internet Applications.

The run-time environment is available as a plug-in for most web browsers and works on a variety of operating systems including Windows, Mac and Linux.

 

So, you have heard the buzz about the brave new world of Windows 8 from MSFT’s BUILD Conference! May be you even attended the wonderful SilverlightShow webinar about “Getting Started with XAML Development in Windows 8” by Gill Cleeren. Ready to get your hands muddy? In this short 2-part article series, we talk about how to get started towards writing data-driven (specifically OData) Windows 8 Metro apps with XAML & C#. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Part 1 – Handling of OData from our XAML Metro App [Consumption & Updates to OData source].

So, you have heard the buzz about the brave new world of Windows 8 from MSFT’s BUILD Conference! May be you even attended the wonderful SilverlightShow webinar about “Getting Started with XAML Development in Windows 8” by Gill Cleeren. Ready to get your hands muddy? In this short 2-part article series, we talk about how to get started towards writing data-driven (specifically OData) Windows 8 Metro apps with XAML & C#. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Part 1 – Handling of OData from our XAML Metro App [Consumption & Updates to OData source].

To contact me directly please visit my blog at http://michaelcrump.net/ or through twitter at http://twitter.com/mbcrump.

This article is Part 9 of the series “10 Laps around Silverlight 5.” If you have missed any other section then please see the Roadmap below.

To refresh your memory on what Silverlight is:

Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing Rich Internet Applications.

The run-time environment is available as a plug-in for most web browsers and works on a variety of operating systems including Windows, Mac and Linux.

One of the most important features added in Windows Phone 7.5 is the multithreaded environment. This missing feature was very criticized in the previous version, but the main reason of its lack was the high battery consumption that is usual in multithread phones. In this release the team has agreed to add the multithread capability but it worked hard to reach a good balance between multithreading and battery life. This is the main reason for the introduction of Background Agents that are a way to manage the battery drain in junction with parallel work made by running applications.

To contact me directly please visit my blog at http://michaelcrump.net/ or through twitter at http://twitter.com/mbcrump.

This article is Part 8 of the series “10 Laps around Silverlight 5.” If you have missed any other section then please see the Roadmap below.

To refresh your memory on what Silverlight is:

Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing Rich Internet Applications.

The run-time environment is available as a plug-in for most web browsers and works on a variety of operating systems including Windows, Mac and Linux.

In the first part of the article I introduced the matter, i.e. adding a Silverlight menu in Sharepoint. The first solution presented, defined as “the client approach”, has a major defect: it cannot be used for anonymous-enabled sites. In this second part we will see another way (that I called the “server approach”) in order to build a Silverlight menu for Sharepoint that can be used also by anonymous users. To make this new approach clearer I will introduce another few general concepts regarding the Sharepoint platform.