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This article is part 2 of the series "XNA for Silverlight developers":
Rendering text output in a game is not as fundamental as it is in other apps or business applications. However, it still is a very important part because you will need this everywhere: to render statistics like the current player score on the screen, to show messages or help text, and of course also for additional features and parts of your game that are not related to the game play itself, like menus or high score screens.
In this tutorial, Peter Kuhn discusses creating a theme pack from Silverlight theme files.
Source: Mister Goodcat
Some time ago Microsoft released the four Silverlight Application Themes Jet Pack, Accent Color, Windows 7 and Cosmopolitan. You can find that download here. The Themes are provided as comfortable installers and integrate as new templates into Visual Studio. The drawback of the loose style XAML files the themes come as is that they cannot be easily used as Toolkit compatible theme packs, which makes dynamic switching of themes difficult, for example. It also requires more effort than necessary to apply the styles in an already existing project. I decided to convert the themes into theme packs, but that turned out to be harder than expected. Read on for a step-by-step guide and an online demo with full source.
This article is Part 1 of the series “XNA for Silverlight developers”:
For Silverlight developers who want to delve into XNA, the hard part is not learning the new set of classes in the library, but the fundamental difference in programming style for some parts of XNA compared to Silverlight. Especially when you have no experience in game programming, you might find some things confusing or even illogical. In the first part of this article, I want to give an overview and explanation of the biggest differences. You will run across all these topics again in the following articles in more detail.
Peter Kuhn has a short example demonstrating the use of the pinch gesture in WP7.
In my first article on Silverlight Show about XNA for Silverlight developers, I briefly mentioned the Gesture Listener of the Silverlight Toolkit that enables advanced gestures in Silverlight on the Windows Phone by using the XNA input libraries. Since then I've been asked about the pinch gesture in particular, so I'm providing a short example of how to use it.
Peter Kuhn has a short post that shows a straight-forward way to create a functioning simple DateTimePicker control.
A question that frequently surfaces on the Silverlight forums is the one after a DateTimePicker control. The Silverlight Toolkit has both a date picker and a time picker, but not the combination of both. The issue tracker of the Toolkit project on Codeplex lists that control among the Top-20 voted features. But when you ask about it, the answer usually is that it's so simple to build one yourself that it's not worth creating a dedicated control for that. However, when I looked at the source code of an attempted DateTimePicker control someone sent me in desperation, I realized that you can get lost in undesired behavior and unforeseeable problems with mutually triggering events easily.
This article is Part 0 of the series “XNA for Silverlight developers”:
Around the time the first Windows Phone 7 devices were released to the market, one popular sentence you heard was "every Silverlight developer is a Windows Phone 7 developer" – and that's true. Silverlight is Microsoft's main platform to do Windows Phone 7 development, and every desktop Silverlight programmer will feel comfortable in the new mobile programming environment instantly. Sure there are differences and libraries specific to the devices, but you won't have to learn a new programming language or new ways to define your UI, and you can use the same development environment you've been using for normal Silverlight development all the time.
This post of Peter Kuhn is nor only about the BookShelf code sample, but also contains general information about shader effects in Silverlight and their performance implications, as well as some weird behaviors of the Silverlight runtime regarding those effects.
On 2010's PDC John Papa held a session named "Kung Fu Silverlight" to show some concepts of MVVM and RIA Services. The associated source code can be downloaded here. I've often used this code as a reference for people who were looking for a nice MVVM sample. Even if it's not fully polished to the last detail, it's an excellent start to learn about the involved patterns and practices. Yesterday, when I wanted to use the sample to demonstrate something, it required me to log in. And when I did that, my browser basically crashed. Well, actually it only hung, but it didn't come back to life, so I had to kill the process. I knew the sample had some performance issues due to a certain visual effect that results in problems, but it never happened before that my browser simply stopped working, so I decided to finally explore the problem in more detail and fix it.
Peter Kuhn solves a problem with the default style for the hyperlink button in Windows Phone 7 which does not wrap the link text.
On Windows Phone 7, some details are wired differently. Often the default templates for controls are heavily simplified due to the lower performance provided on the devices. I recall a statement from someone official (unfortunately from memory as I don't remember where it was) that sacrifices have been made especially in those situations where we have a most prevalent use of certain controls. In this case, the common scenario for a hyperlink is to show a text link, so consequently the default template on WP7 is tailored to text use. That means that those 95% of the developers for Windows Phone 7 that use hyperlinks with text content benefit from an increased performance.
Peter Kuhn explains how to work around some Data Contract Serializer issuses on WP7.
Last time I've blogged about how I like the data contract serializer to persist data in tombstoning situations on the Windows Phone. Since then, I was contacted by a few developers who had problems with some of the implications that kind of serialization has. The reason for this partly is that designing your types for serialization is not as trivial as it seems at first, but also due to some very misleading information you'll run into when you receive errors during the process of serialization. So I decided to put together a list of requirements and pitfalls you have to take into consideration when you want to use the data contract serializer.