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Always start with the good news: The good news is that the Manipulation events in the July beta of the Windows Phone 7 development tools no longer have the orientation problem I discussed in my blog entry Basic Manipulation Event Handling in Windows Phone 7 (at least with translation). You can flip the phone emulator sideways and translation coordinates don't need to be finagled. More good news: I am now able to get the emulator to recognize two fingers on my two touch screens, so I've been able to experiment with scaling as well as translation.

Other than that, I'm still not seeing behavior that feels correct to me, based both on my familiarity with theManipulation events implemented in the Windows Presentation Foundation, and the degree of work necessary to get meaningful information from the WP7 implementations.

In the past two installments of this column, I’ve discussed some techniques implementing fluid UI on your own. I was partially inspired by the upcoming introduction of a fluid UI feature in Silverlight 4. Now that Silverlight 4 has been officially released, that’s what I’ll be covering here. Silverlight 4’s foray into fluid UI is rather narrowly confined—it’s restricted to the loading and unloading of items in a ListBox—but it gives us some important hints on how to extend fluid UI techniques with our own implementations. More fluid UI behaviors are available in Expression Blend 4.

I don't know if the approach I've shown here is the "correct" way to handle orientation changes on the phone. But it seems like the start of what could be a useful general-purpose technique for optimizing space no matter how the user wants to use the device.

I've seen some print ads recently that feature a phone with a simulation of 1960's style flip-number clock. Such a clock is fairly trivial in Silverlight.

In pretty much any graphics system, transforms constitute the most important feature that doesn’t actually draw anything. Instead, transforms alter the appearance of visual objects by modifying coordinates with mathematical formulas generally expressed as a matrix multiplication.