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Matthias Shapiro exlains how to create a little XAML icon that changes to represent whatever theme the user has in place on their phone.

Source: Designer Silverlight

When designing a “You are here” icon for the map in ShopSavvy (download now on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7. It’s free and super awesome), I decided to try something a little different. Because ShopSavvy is a theme-compliant application, I thought it might be fun to have the “you are here” icon be representation of the user’s actual phone.

In this post, Matthias Shapiro diggs into making an ApplicationBar in Windows Phone 7.

Source: Designer Silverlight

App bars in Windows Phone 7 are actually a pretty cool little bit of functionality. They give the user 1-4 instantly accessible options for dealing with the screen the user is on, their buttons auto-animate in, they offer “always on” funtionality that isn’t going to be hidden by the on-screen keyboard, they give designers and developers instant access to a range of default icons in Windows Phone 7 ecosystem and they offer a much wider range of options when the user taps on the ellipses to open more options.

In this post, Matthias Shapiro will quickly walk you through the process of forcing a theme in your WP7 project.

Source: Designer Silverlight

If you want to create a design that uses some custom colors, it can be difficult to make sure those colors fit both themes, which can throw a cramp into your creative juices. Additionally, if you decide to toss theme-compatibility to the wind in favor of your own design, you’ll need to make sure all your control templates conform and don’t go all wonky when the user changes their theme.

In this blog post, Matthias Shapiro discusses what to do if you have a sound file that you want to be included when downloading your WP7 app and be played even if the user is listening to music.

Source: Designer Silverlight

First, grab the audio you want to add to the application and, if it’s not already a .wav file, make it so. [...]

When prepping your audio, keep in mind if you want the user to hear it over their music. If so, make sure it is LOUD.

Matthias Shapiro explains how to fix a problem with multiple ListPickers in a ScrollViewer.

Source: Designer Silverlight

The ListPicker is available via the Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone 7. If you don’t have it, you should get it. Get the source as well, for reasons that will be clear in one more sentence.

The only problem is that I can’t scroll if I do this because I run the risk of accidentally opening the ListPicker (which should be a tap interaction) when swiping (which is a gesture interaction).

In this post, Matthias Shapiro talks about some of the problems that he faced while developing for Windows Phone 7.

Source: Designer Silverlight

One of the most frustrating things about developing for Windows Phone 7 has been the experience with the application approval process. To illustrate the problems my team is having, let us demonstrate with a theoretical sample application.

Let’s say we want an application for reading all of Shakespeare’s sonnets. There are 154 of them, so we’ll want to break them out, maybe one per screen, allow the user to read them sequentially or jump to a particular sonnet. Maybe we want to be able to search through the sonnets too, just a nice easy way of navigating to that one line we can remember.

Source: Designer Silverlight

The scenario we wanted went something like this: We wanted the user to tap a button and launch the camera task. This would close (tombstone) the application until the camera task was complete (the user took a picture and returned to the app). Upon completion, the application is re-initiated and the camera task hands the application an image stream that we can use to determine the bar code number. We then navigate to a screen that will show all the information about the product the user just scanned.

I’m currently working on porting the run-away hit mobile application ShopSavvy to Windows Phone 7 (sign up to be a beta tester) and one of the things I really wished I had was the WrapPanel.

(For those who are new to Silverlight/WPF/Windows Phone 7, the WrapPanel stacks UI elements either horizontally or vertically like the StackPanel except that, when it hits the panel limit it… wait for it… wraps and starts stacking in a new column/row. Handy.)

I found a way to add it with the Silverlight Toolkit, but doing that added 140 Kb to my application. Maybe I’m just stuck in the world of J2ME, but adding 140 Kb to my mobile app isn’t OK if I can help it.

Previously, if I wanted to have a piece of text that said “Your name is [username]” I could either use the old Horizontal-Stack-Panel-And-2-TextBlocks trick or write a value converter (not going to be seen below because there’s a great example of it over here. Incidentally, that example is totally irrelevant if you’re going to use StringFormat, but more on that in a second).

The StringFormat option in Silverlight 4 allows you put all that information into a single field, which is extremely useful not only for TextBlocks, but for Content fields in a Button. In fact, let’s use that as an example.