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When the user rotates the phone we want the layout to change to match the new dimensions.  This is also fairly straight forward to implement. The first step is to have an additional column in the LayoutRoot which can accommodate the totals data. When the phone is rotated into landscape mode, we will move the TotalsGrid into the second column adjacent to the NumbersGrid.

Whilst working on a proof of concept, we came up with an idea for an interesting menu in the form of an arc around a company logo at the top-left corner of the UI.

These icons formed a fish eye effect when the mouse moved over them and could be dragged onto the UI to open new windows.

As i write before current Silverlight Grid Layout breakes best practices of HTML and Adobe Flex Grid layouts. Current defention based approach have following disadvantages that makes xaml coding very hard:

1. It is very hard to create new row. In that case you should rewrite all Grid.Row and Grid.Columns for all rows inserted below.
2. Defenitions are static by their nature and because of it, it is impossible to use grid for dynamic forms. Currently even in toolkit DataForm Microsoft is using StackPanel. But StackPanel is not designed for multi column layout that have dataform.

There is lot of buzz about LOB Business Form Layout for new platforms WPF & Silverlight, both capable of displaying rich content and extend functionalities of existing components so better then ever before.

XAML is better then earlier Rapid Form designers where you need to drag and drop within an IDE and the layout management becomes so complicated because no IDE is perfect. I remember upgrading from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008 and now 2010, most of our ASP.NET and WinForm projects would require lot of effort to work seamlessly in newer versions. The worst of all is, modifying layout without IDE becomes way to difficult.

WPF now has a great UI feature that Silverlight got back in the SL3 timeframe: Layout Rounding. Layout rounding lets you specify that you want the shape to snap to the closest whole pixel. Rather than have a double-width gray line, you'll get a single-width black line, but it may be a partial pixel off from where you thought it would be. That's the trade-off, and it's one that many folks are willing to make.

Today we need to create centered content with fixed maxwidth. It is very easy to implement it for fixed width, but is not clear how to achieve the same for maxwidth.

In Expression Blend, we’ve been thinking for a loooong time about how to make it ever easier to create great animated visual effects quickly on top of the Silverlight and WPF runtimes. We’ve been looking at large-scale animation needs since Blend 2 SP1 and steadily building features to address those needs, and we think we’ve reached critical mass. With Blend 4, we have a compelling set of technologies that work very well together.

The next post in this series will be a side bar with a lot of background information on how the various templates in ListBox work in Silverlight and WPF, and why you were doing what you were doing in this example. After that sidebar, I will continue with more fun things that you can do with path-based layout.

Path-based layout opens many interesting creative possibilities, way beyond just laying out things on a path. But more on that later. It is currently supported on Silverlight 4 and WPF, but not yet on Windows Phone.