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Paul Sheriff explains how to deal with orientation changes in Windows Phone 7.

Source: Paul Sheriff's Blog for the Real World

Developing for Windows Phone does require you to think a little differently. For example on a regular computer you only have to worry about the screen orientation being in portrait mode. However, on a phone the user can turn the phone sideways and even upside down. If the user switches from portrait orientation (Figure 1) to landscape orientation (Figure 2) you end up with more room to display your data horizontally. You can take advantage of this extra room by switching between two different XAML templates when the phone orientation changes.

Source: Paul Sheriff's Blog

Developing for Windows Phone is easy if you have been doing any XAML at all. That’s because you use Silverlight for Windows Phone development! This is a great thing because everything you already know you can apply immediately. Let’s take a simple example like presenting a list of products with images in a list box (Figure 1) in the Windows Phone emulator. This article assumes that you have VS.NET 2010 and the Windows Phone tools installed along with it. The Windows Phone tools must be downloaded separately and installed with VS.NET 2010. You may also download the free VS.NET 2010 Express for Windows Phone developer environment.

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Source: Paul Sheriff's Blog

When you start to bind data in Silverlight (or WPF for that matter) you will most likely have data that is in one format that you may need to convert to another format. For example if you have a decimal number (price) that is 19.95, you would want to display it as $19.95. Of course you can use a normal .NET format string to accomplish this, but you could also write some code to convert the decimal number 19.95 to a string with the dollar sign in front of it “$19.95”.

If you are using Silverlight's ListBox control, you do not have to write code to sort your data. Instead you can use the built-in CollectionViewSource object in XAML to perform the sorting for you. This assumes that you are using a collection that implements the IEnumerable or IList interfaces.

In the past if you had two controls that you needed to work together, you would have to write code. For example, if you want a label control to display any text a user typed into a text box you would write code to do that. If you want turn off a set of controls when a user checks a check box, you would also have to write code. However, with XAML, these operations become very easy to do.