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The MainWindow control derives from UserControl and is meant to replace the default layout root. It provides the following features:

• A title bar that users can drag to move the window. The title bar consumes out-of-browser configuration data for the icon and title text.
• A default border that users can drag to resize the window. Hovering over the border changes the cursor as you would expect. A BorderBrush dependency property lets you customize the border background from the application layout root.
• Isolated Storage support to store the window size, position, and state on application shutdown and retrieve the values on the next startup.

This MEF catalog behaves like the DeploymentCatalog with a few exceptions. First, it will save any XAP file to isolated storage whenever it retrieves one, and second, if the application is OOB and offline, it will automatically load the XAPs from isolated storage instead of trying to fetch them from the web.

Instead of building my own catalog from scratch, I decided to cheat a little bit and use some of the existing catalogs "under the covers."

Basically, this feature lets you draw the entire window area yourself. You have complete control within the window rectangle (optionally with rounded corners).

This gives you a lot of room for both creativity and abuse. It is your responsibility to take usability into consideration and provide custom UI for common window interactions as appropriate. To help out with this, you can programmatically move, resize, pin, minimize, normalize, maximize, and close the window.

It takes about 27 minutes but is much easier than you would think.  There are a lot of little things that you need to do but it is fun and when you are done you will be ready to make your very own Silverlight video tutorials just like me and possibly get MSFT MVP along the way.

Out of the box, the Windows Phone 7 tools give you a pretty good starting place for your application. The List template is based on the MVVM pattern, includes some sample code to help you better visualize your solution, and two pages to get you started: main page (list of items) and details page (details for an item). In this post we’ll explore the page navigation options available to the WP7 developer, starting with the OOB experience.

RIA Services does not support Out-Of-Browser (OOB) Forms authentication out of the box. The reason this does not work is that the Browser networking stack handles cookies differently than the Client networking stack (used OOB).

I had decided to create a list of what videos were already available on the Learning Pages of Silverlight.net.  When I clicked on the page for the entire list, however, I was quite daunted by the sheer number. I opened the “source” for the page, and found that there was an easy screen scraping capability, however. The name of each video was also a link to its landing page, and so I could grab the HTML and search for the appropriate links.

By default, when debugging, Silverlight will launch your application in the browser. However, if you application is configured to run in Out of Browser (OOB) mode and is installed on the box you can configure debugging to occur directly in the OOB application window rather than the browser.

With Silverlight you can run your Out-of-Browser applications in elevated trust mode. This will allow you to relax the normal sandboxed barrier Silverlight restricts applica