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In wondering where to start talking about Windows Phone 7 (#wp7) development I thought maybe it’d be best if I started right at the very beginning. A very logical place to start. Whether I can go on till I get to the end ala The King’s advice in Alice in Wonderland remains to be seen. I’ve just paved a machine and want to get it set up for Windows Phone development using the emulator. 

Today I got this error “XAML Namespace http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008 is not resolved.” in a Silverlight 4 project. I happened right after I added some VisualStates in Blend 4. I could remove the VisualState XAML and everything would then build again fine. As meantioned I googled the error but couldn’t find a solution.

To go along with the Expression Studio 4 launch, the team has put together a new 5-day OnRamp training course. The course introduces the Expression Studio tools and is very useful as a first step into the wild world of Expression. The fifth day of the course leads you to the .toolbox site where more advanced courses and tutorials are provided.

Okay, tough love: if you are serious about Silverlight development, the days of using one Integrated Development Environment for all you work are…. over.  The benefits of adding Expression Blend to your toolkit, and getting serious about learning how to use it well are so overwhelming that you can no longer afford to ignore them.

The feedback from the Silverlight 4 application themes released and the latest in process have been overwhelmingly toward the positive.  We appreciate the feedback and hopefully you appreciate the transparency in the process.  As a developer I want my fellow brethren to appreciate good design and use it whenever possible … even as a default if you don’t have designers on board.

Feel free to use this plugin as you like. It is a simple plug in that shows information about the Twitter user right inline with the Tweet. This post will explain what the Sticky plugin does and of course I’ll share the plugin with you. I’ll follow up with another post to explain how to create a plugin using the Seesmic Desktop platform, Visual Studio 2010, and Expression Blend.

We’re turning this theme around FAST and I wanted to throw it out here in an initial iteration for preview and comment.  This is the ‘dark’ version of the theme and there will be a light version as well.  This represents only the core control set, but like the others will include other SDK controls as well.

Basically if you have situation where you need to either show or hide a visual element, you need to know what State you are in. As you can’t attach 2 different Triggers (Behaviours) to the same element, & expect to activate/fire them in an alternating manner with the same action (i.e. a mouse click). Blend will only ever fire one & continue to fire the same one. (The closest in the Z order i presume…) And my first thought was, that i needed some code to determine what state I was in. But you don’t!