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In introducing the concept of plugins, it was made clear that the Seesmic Desktop Platform (SDP) would be leveraging the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) that was to be included as a part of Silverlight. Seesmic would define MEF contracts that as long as developers adhered to them (and of course implemented any required interfaces for actual functionality) then the plugin would be able to extend the platform. The most grandiose idea can be simply stated as if you don’t like how Twitter is represented in Seesmic, fine…change it. Of course, I suspect most people will be just fine with their implementation and choose to extend in other areas as I’ve done.

The best part?  It’s built on Silverlight 4 and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)!  This is awesome news for those of us who have been using various clients that have been locked down to specific use scenarios.  There always is a few things I want/need/etc in software and it’s great now that (at least in this space) I can change things I don’t like.

That’s right, Seesmic Desktop is moving more toward a “shell” concept (my words, not theirs) where they provide some defaults but also extensibility points for anyone to replace and/or extend.  Don’t like the way they implemented Twitter?  Fine, change it (or search for a better plugin).

In this tutorial we will build a Twitter user profile screen. You will be able to display the user image, follower count, friend count, status post count, user description and load the user page background image.

First I would like to say that the code is from Scott Gu’s article Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight. I am very excited that Silverlight will soon be capable of working on Windows Phones. Designing for the phone brings numerous design and user experience problems not associated with the average 20-30 inch computer monitors. About 6 months ago I began tackling those problems in my previous Blend tutorials for layout, animation and video within a iPhone interface.

On Monday I had the opportunity to present the MIX 2010 Day 1 Keynote in Las Vegas (you can watch a video of it here).  In the keynote I announced the release of the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (we’ll ship the final release of it next month) and the VS 2010 RC tools for Silverlight 4.  I also had the chance to talk for the first time about how Silverlight and XNA can now be used to build Windows Phone 7 applications.

During my talk I did two quick Windows Phone 7 coding demos using Silverlight – a quick “Hello World” application and a “Twitter” data-snacking application.  Both applications were easy to build and only took a few minutes to create on stage.  Below are the steps you can follow yourself to build them on your own machines as well.

Within a matter of minutes, Mike has developed and started running a functional WP7 twitter application that makes cross domain calls. He demonstrates how to design the interface using the designer and tools in Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, and writes the event handlers to hook into a Twitter API. The key point of this demo is how easy it is to develop for WP7 with Silverlight. 

The process of creating a custom Twitter map is fairly easy, these are the steps for creating a Silverlight tweets map.

The Silverlight MVP community is notorious at sharing information through blogs and Twitter. [...]

You can follow the entire group using this link: www.twitter.com/john_papa/SilverlightMVP.