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In this post, Jeff Prosise discusses one really cool feature of WP7 - the location service.

Source: Jeff Prosise's Blog

The location service is a set of APIs that rely on Assisted-GPS (A-GPS), Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS), and cell-site triangulation to expose location data to an application. Simply put, this means that a Windows phone app can determine where it’s at at almost any time, excepting situations where GPS satellites aren’t reachable, cell towers aren’t in range, and no Wi-Fi signals are available.  Combined with Microsoft’s Bing Maps Silverlight control for Windows Phone, the location service opens the door to an entire genre of apps that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

Jeff Prosise introduces the accelerometer API in Silverlight for Windows Phone and demonstrates how to build apps that can do cool things with it.

Source: Jeff Prosise's Blog

One of the sensor devices present in every Windows phone is an accelerometer that provides real-time acceleration data in the X, Y, and Z directions. Applications can use that data to determine a phone’s 3D spatial orientation, and to detect changes in that orientation. Under the hood, Silverlight for Windows Phone uses the accelerometer to determine the page orientation. But the accelerometer can do much more than just differentiate between portrait and landscape: it can be used to build apps that simulate physics. Ever seen the popular iPhone game named Labyrinth, in which you guide a marble through a maze by tilting the phone? Labyrinth is a great example of an app that uses an accelerometer.

Yesterday we announced Part 3 of Jeff Prosise's Touch Interfaces for WP7 series and now he is ready with the final installment.

Source: Jeff Prosise's Blog

The first three articles in this series presented three different ways to respond to touch input in Windows phone apps: mouse events, Touch.FrameReported events, and manipulation events. In this, the fourth and final installment, we’ll discuss a means for processing touch input that trumps all three – namely, the GestureListener class in the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit.

In the third part of his Touch Interfaces for WP7 series, Jeff Prosise discusses manipulation events.

Source: Jeff Prosise's Blog

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I described how to build touch interfaces for phone apps using mouse events and Touch.FrameReported events. Part 3 presents yet another way to respond to touch input: manipulation events.

Manipulation events originated in WPF, and they’re substantially richer in WPF than in Silverlight for Windows Phone. Charles Petzold has ably documented the differences in an article of his own. Still, even in their somewhat limited form, manipulation events can be useful in certain scenarios – particularly scenarios involving simple one-finger dragging or panning or, to a lesser extent, scenarios that involve two-finger pinching (typically used for zooming).

In Part 2 of this series, Jeff Prosise digs deeper into Silverlight for Windows Phone and how to process touch events directly.

Source: Jeff Prosise's Blog

In Part 1 of this series, I described how to build simple touch interfaces for phone apps by processing mouse events. Recall that primary touch events – events involving the first finger to touch the screen – are automatically promoted to mouse events by the run-time, and that you can build a UI that responds to single touch by writing mouse-event handlers.

Source: Jeff Prosise's Blog

Every Windows phone has a Back button that functions like a browser's Back button. I like this, because on the iPhone, I often have to go all the way back to the main screen just to back out of what I'm currently doing.

The Back button is accompanied by a Start button and a Search button, and Windows phones have other buttons as well: for example, a power button and a camera-shutter button. But the Back button is the only one that you can hook in software.

A while back, I blogged about the INavigationContentLoader interface introduced in Silverlight 4. INavigationContentLoader is an extensibility point in Silverlight’s navigation framework that lets you provide your own plug-in for loading pages. Silverlight 4 comes with one INavigationContentLoader implementation in a class named PageResourceContentLoader, which loads pages from assemblies in an application’s XAP file. I recently put INavigationContentLoader to work by building my own content loader that loads pages from local XAP files as well as remote assemblies. I named my implementation DynamicContentLoader, and you can download a Visual Studio 2010 project that uses it from Wintellect’s Web site.

Localization is (and has always been) a hot topic in Silverlight. There are many ways to do it, but most solutions that I've seen use some variation of the technique described in the Silverlight documentation, which puts localization resources in RESXes and uses data binding to bind XAML elements to localized resources. It works, but it has always left a bad taste in my mouth. 

I've spent copious amounts of time lately digging into Silverlight 4's new Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and seem to find new uses for it every day. I love the fact that you can download a remote XAP file and import all of its exported parts with basically two lines of code.