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This blog post by Colin Eberhardt describes a Windows Phone 7 NavigationList control - a list control designed for navigation pages.

Source: ScottLogic

A few months ago I blogged about the relative performance of the Windows Phone 7 emulator versus the same code being run on the real hardware. There were a couple of take-home messages from this blog post, firstly the performance on real hardware is typically much slower than the emulator, and secondly an ItemsControl can render the same content as a ListBox in less time, making them a better choice for rendering lists of items for navigation.

Colin Eberhardt has posted a summary of Gartner's latest mobile smartphone sales predications.

Source: ScottLogic

Yesterday Gartner released its latest mobile smartphone sales predications, with the figures showing a dramatic turnaround in their predictions for the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 platform.

In this blog post, Colin Eberhardt looks at how to implement the fly-out fly-in effect seen in native Windows Phone 7 applications.

Source: ScottLogic

This is the third in my “Metro In Motion” series where I am looking at how to re-create some of the stylish transitions and animations found in native Windows Phone 7 applications. As a Silverlight developer we have controls that adhere to the static Metro styling, but apart from Pivot and Panorama, the more dynamic features of the Metro style are something we have to come up with ourselves. So far previous posts have provided re-useable implementations for the fluid list animations between pivot pages and the ‘peel’ animation seen when applications exit. In this blog post I provide a simple re-useable implementation of the title fly-out and fly-in effect. This effect is not that easy to describe, so we’ll let the following picture do the talking …

Colin Eberhardt published part 2 of his Metro in Motion series (read part 1 here). In this post Colin demonstrates how to implement the animated ‘peel’ effect seen when native Windows Phone 7 applications exit.

Source: ScottLogic

In my previous blog post I discussed how the Metro Design Language that heavily influences the Windows Phone 7 style is not just about static graphics, it is also about fluid transitions. In that post I demonstrated a technique for making items within lists slide gracefully as the user moves between pivot pages. The post was pretty popular, so I have decided to turn it into a series, looking at how to implement the various fluid animations that are present in Windows Phone 7 native applications.

A feature found in most native Windows Phone 7 applications is the ‘peel’ effect where when the application is exited, the various components peel away from the top of the screen to the bottom. You can see my implementation of this effect in action in the video below. You might have to watch it a few times, the animation comes right at the end as is over pretty quickly!

In this blog post, Colin Eberhardt presents an attached behaviour that gracefully slides the contents of a list into view when used in conjunction with a Pivot control, emulating the Windows Phone 7 email application.

Source: ScottLogic

Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 provides a basic Metro styling for elements such as Buttons and Checkboxes, it also has a few phone specific controls such as Pivot and Panorama. These controls make it easy to create a basic Metro interface, although again, I refer you to Scott Barnes’ blog, Metro is not all about black and white! However, when using a WP7 phone you will probably notice that the native applications, email, maps and settings, have a bit more ‘flair’, lists gracefully slide into view, or ‘peel’ off the screen when an item is selected. Metro is not just about static style, it is “alive in motion”.

In this blog post, Colin Eberhardt presents a simple attached behaviour that uses a Thumb control within a Popup to adorn any UI element so that the user can resize it.

Source: ScottLogic

A simple feature that has become quite popular on the web is to attache a small handle to text areas so that the user can resize them, this is useful if a user wants to add a large piece of text to a small comment form for example. Interestingly the Google Chrome browser makes all text areas resizeable by default, which leads to web developers wondering how to turn this feature off for their website. I thought that this was a pretty useful feature, so decided to implement a little attached behaviour that would do the same think for Silverlight.

In this article, Colin Eberhardt describes the development of a Windows Phone 7 Jump List control, giving a step-by-step account of the control's development.

Source: The Code Project

About a month ago I created a Jump List control for Windows Phone 7 and published it on my blog. I got a lot of great feedback from the control, including questions about how certain parts of it work. As a result I decided to publish an in-depth article here on codeproject which describes the development of this control.
                                               

In this post, Colin Eberhardt describes a method of using attached properties to bind a ViewModel which contains multiple data series to a Visiblox chart without any code-behind.

Source: ScottLogic

 The Visiblox chart supports databinding in both WPF and Silverlight, where the X and Y values for each datapoint are bound to properties on an underlying model. However, there is no interface for binding a varying number of series (i.e a collection of collections). The solution provided here is similar to the one which Jeremiah Morrill published for binding multiple series to the Silverlight Toolkit charts, but with a few added extras, like series title binding and series type selection.

In this blog post, Colin Eberhardt shows just how easy it is to use Google Sky as a tile source for Bing Maps, bringing the universe to Windows Phone 7!

Source: ScottLogic

 Personally I think mapping is one of the most exciting forms of application for mobile devices – the fantastic imagery available from Bing and Google maps, coupled with GPS technology, results in some pretty amazing tools. As a Windows Phone 7 developer, I have spent a fair bit of time poking round the Silverlight Bing Maps APIs. A really cool feature of the Bing Maps control is that it accepts custom tile-sources. You can find code elsewhere that explains how to use this to render Google Maps data via a Bing maps chart control. For a bit of fun I decided to use this approach to render Google Sky on WP7 …