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This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.

This is part 5 from the article series on Windows Phone 7.

Windows Phone 7 Part #1: Getting Started 
Windows Phone 7 Part #2: Your first app 
Windows Phone 7 Part #3: Understanding navigation
Windows Phone 7 Part #4: The application lifecycle
Windows Phone 7 Part #5: Panorama and Pivot controls 
Windows Phone 7 Part #6: Advanced interaction 
Windows Phone 7 Part #7: Understanding Push Notifications
Windows Phone 7 Part #8: Using Sensors

Speaking with people and showing them my beloved Windows Phone 7 device, it appear evident one of the main surprises about this new operating system is the easy user experience and the completely unexpected singularity of its interface. It is true for sure the interface of Windows Phone 7 is deeply studied to be something that breaks most of the rules that have been pillars on other devices before their birth, not for the only will of being unique and distinguished by the competitors, but also because the feedback, the user may have from the phone, is something completely different from a laptop or desktop computer and it worth an user experience specifically tailored for it.

Jeff Prosise has two blog posts discussing tombstoning in Silverlight for WP7:

• Tombstoning Pivot Controls in Silverlight for Windows Phone 
• Tombstoning Panorama Controls in Silverlight for Windows Phone 

  What is tombstoning? In short, while Windows phones are perfectly capable of running several applications at once, only OEMs can write apps that run in the background. Apps written by ordinary mortals can only run one at a time. If the user switches away from your app by, say, pressing the phone’s Start button, your app is terminated. To be more precise, the app is deactivated, and if the user next presses the Back button, the app is reactivated. But because deactivation really does mean the app was terminated, all state – including the state of the app’s controls – is lost. We refer to the deactivation-reactivation cycle as tombstoning.

   

In this post, Jeff Wilcox discusses how to smoothly fade in background image changes within the Panorama control that ships in the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools.

Source: The Blog of Jeff Wilcox

Using ‘DynamicBackgroundPanorama’

Just set the Background property of the Panorama! You can use data binding, or just straight code, for this. The example sample I wrote has two sub pages: one which just shows the current Bing search background for your region, and another which shows some photos that are just built into the project. No special work required!

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Senthil Kumar has posted some new Windows Phone 7 training videos that cover topics like Panorama and Pivots, Planning and Optimizing for Performance, Design using Microsoft Blend etc.

Source: Senthil Kumar's Blog

Well , i havn’t got enough time to look in to all the updated videos , but did see some of the new one’s like Panorama and Pivots ,Location and Bing Maps and Optimizing for Performance , looks pretty impressive .

The Pivots and Panorama session explains about how these features are used in the Metro design and when and how to use them too.The Bing Map session is pretty long too and covers techniques for using the Location Services and the Bing Map Control.

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Jeff Blankenburg has published four more post from his new series called 31 Days of Windows Phone:

• Day #15: Isolated Storage
• Day #16: The Panorama Control
• Day #17: The Pivot Control
• Day #18: WebBrowser Control

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Source: Jay Kimble's Blog

My tombstoning demo is on an interaction on page 2 of the Panorama (Page 1 is a simple navigation facility to show a different screen altogether). [...]

The before is on the left and the after resume is on the right. As you can see we didn’t end up on the right page of the Panorama. So I did some digging into the Panorama. Obviously if it were straight forward I wouldn’t be posting this.

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Source: Shawn Wildermuth's Blog

As I've seen, many developers want to use these controls so determining the best path here is an important discussion.

Both of these controls work in similar ways in that they have sub-content areas. For example, the Panorama allows you to specify a variable number of panels (or PanoramaItem objects) inside the panorama that make up the control.

• Architecting WP7 - Part 1 of 10: Navigation Framework

Source: Dave Relyea's Silverlight Blog

If you are doing Windows Phone 7 development, chances are that you are either using or have considered using the Panorama. To make a truly glorious Panorama application, to immerse the user in the experience, or for branding purposes, many applications pay a lot of attention to the background. The Panorama has a Background property of type Brush. Although this is most often used with an ImageBrush, it can also be a SolidColorBrush or a BradientBrush. Using gradients is not recommended, unless you are a fan of color banding. It would be nice if the ImageBrush could be used with a WriteableBitmap, but that doesn’t work. But there is something better…