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If you've been searching for the Windows Phone 7 Series demo apps that were shown during the MIX10 keynote. Look no further! The Windows phone team has assembled them all in an article on their blog. Click here to see them.
By: Peter VanRysdam, Chief Marketing Officer at 352 Media Group, shares his experience developing for Windows Phone 7 Series using the Silverlight platform.
Earlier this month, thousands of MIX10 attendees, and countless more who watched online, got a firsthand look at the new application development platform and tools for creating compelling applications on Windows Phone 7 Series, using Silverlight and the XNA Framework. MIX10 attendees got a little more than they expected when Scott Guthrie’s Day 1 keynote closed with a Smartphone remote-controlled t-shirt cannon rolling on stage. The cannon, driven by a Windows Phone 7 Series application built on the Silverlight platform, shot Scott’s iconic red polo shirts into the audience. Check out the keynote here.
At 352 Media Group, a Web design company and developer of Silverlight applications, we created the user interface for the app. In doing so, we unknowingly helped prove just how easy the application development process is for the Windows Phone 7 Series. Believe it or not, our developers had no idea the app they’d written was for the phone until just a few hours before the MIX10 Day 1 keynote!
The Microsoft Coding4Fun.com team asked 352 Media Group to write an app in Silverlight that would fit in an 800 by 400 pixel area. Coding4Fun.com was creating the application code and wireframes, while we were building the front-end user experience. We didn’t see the actual code they were developing, but knew they would be using some standard controls. We decided to skin them, making it that much easier to integrate our design into their code. For example, the accelerator pedal we designed is simply a button with a delay to mimic the look of a standard pedal. The toggle for forward and reverse is a basic slider, as seen on the drive screen below.
When all was said and done, we designed the graphics for the icons and the main screens, and created the XAML code for the transitions, buttons, and rollover states. The final code integrated seamlessly with the backend application used to control the cannon. It is a testament to how easy it is for a Silverlight developer to transition to a Windows Phone developer. All the tools are the same, and all your experience in Silverlight development translates directly to mobile device development.
One of the most interesting features of the app was the use of the Windows Phone 7’s accelerometer to control the cannon’s pan and tilt functions. The screenshots below show before and after shots of the aiming screen, which pulled in real data about the phone’s position.
Before:
After: 
If you want to try it out for yourself, the code for the cannon app, including the user interface, is available for download from Coding4Fun.com’s blog.
By: Nathan Dunlap, Director of UX Integration of IdentityMine, who shares his experience developing for Windows Phone 7 Series using the Silverlight platform.
Let’s not waste time, I might as well jump to the obligatory and cliché quote you all know is coming (I will even help make it obvious by wrapping it quotation marks and citing it): “It is true, if you are already developing applications for .NET, you are already a Windows Phone developer.” – Nathan Dunlap, www.designerslove.net.
Be prepared to hear this often over the coming years as the Windows Phone becomes a popular development platform. Now that I have gotten a firsthand experience developing applications for Windows Phone 7 Series, including the Graphic.ly comic book reader and the Seesmic Windows Phone client, I can unabashedly repeat this statement in the echo chamber.
Unabashedly? You betcha. I’m all in.
Okay, here is the nitty gritty about my experience and the “surprises” I discovered as I began to explore Windows Phone 7 Series development. Let’s start with the fact that I belong to the ragtag band of misfits called “integrators.” You know those folks who don’t really know who we are, toeing the line between user experience (UX) designer and user interface (UI) developer.
Surprise #1 - There is a place for me, the integrator.
My skills are applicable to this brave new world -in current and previous mobile platforms, not so much. In competing technologies there is a pretty clear delineation between the skills of the different roles and disciplines. You either need to be very well versed in languages and frameworks that have a steep learning curve, or you get to live in an extremely disconnected world of “design it and pray your developer-in-crime doesn’t destroy your heart and soul when they mangle your ideas into a ‘real’ application.”
Surprise #2 - Performance wasn’t a stumbling block.
I fully expected mobile application development to be a huge compromise between design intent and hardware capability. Guess what? It’s not. In fact, 60 fps animations are the norm, not the exception. Granted, I set CacheMode=BitmapCache enough times to make me really think this should be a default value on all FrameworkElements, but I didn’t have to do any other funky wrangling to maintain fast and smooth animations. In full transparency, we did have some snafus when we tried to use MultiScaleImage with local content in the Graphic.ly comic book reader. When we embedded Deep Zoom Composer generated content into the application, a nonstandard use of the control, we encounter some issues with stutter as we navigated around the MultiScaleImage. This turned out to be due to downloads of new image content not being on a background thread. The downloads are actually optimized to use a background thread when they come from a Web server so they do not interrupt the UI thread. But get this - the application that was demoed on stage at MIX10 was using the nonstandard local content approach and the stutter was not that apparent. The amazing thing was getting to see actual comic book images when we did run the MultiScaleImage content from a remote server. The performance was downright amazing. Come on folks, we are talking about Deep Zoom on our phones - it’s a sweet experience. A great way to look at nose hairs (watch the keynote demo for the reference).
Sure, I made some really logical decisions about how to optimize my graphics based on my previous years of Web design experience, but it was a much looser dependency than I am used to. GPU based hardware acceleration is a beautiful thing.
Surprise #3 - Deploying to a device couldn’t be easier.
I have a decent amount of experience deploying to other mobile devices. None of them are nearly as easy as Windows Phone 7 Series: plug it in, deploy to device, and away we go. The first time I deployed an app to the phone I ran upstairs from my home office to show my wife the app that proudly displayed “Hello Nate.” She looked at me confused - I’ve shown her much more impressive stuff. I tried to answer the puzzled look on her face, “this is a big deal. I’m going to be doing a lot of these apps in my career. This was my first one!”
Surprise #4 - The emulator is a great developer environment, especially if you have a multitouch machine on Windows 7
We were testing a lot of swipe, and pinch and zoom. If you haven’t done a lot of multitouch development, then you don’t know intimately that your finger does not behave like a mouse. Anybody who has done development for multitouch on Microsoft Surface knows that using the mouse in the Simulator is no replacement for actual hands on interaction. Fingers are erratic little buggers. The path and velocity from a swipe gesture with a mouse looks very different than one from your finger. When your finger is roughly 1/3 of the size of the screen real estate, you quickly realize the importance of being able to test with actual touch. The emulator works, and it works well. Translation from the emulator to an actual physical device is not a huge delta in experience.
Tip: take the time to resize the emulator to match the actual physical size of a phone. Feature request: I want to rotate the phone by grabbing on the simulated physical are of the phone…
Surprise #5 - There is not much new to learn.
The platform doesn’t expose a huge toy box of framework elements developers have never experienced anywhere else. What did I have to learn? ApplicationBar, Pivot controls, and matching the planar projections that are used in the default UI. ApplicationBar is easy - it has Buttons and MenuItems that behave just like anywhere else. It’s a pretty magical moment when you set SupportedPageOrientations on the Page element and rotate the phone and all of your UI updates using the rich layout system the platform provides and all your Button icons in the application rotate to match the orientation. The ApplicationBar is a very well thought out control that is very versatile. Stylistically, it doesn’t impose on your UI and it truly does create a common unified area for application commands.
Want a custom splash screen? Create a 480x800 .jpg image and name is SplashScreenImage.jpg and voila! So easy I didn’t think it could be true, but it was. Need something from one of your existing libraries? No extra work, just add the reference. For example, the “cover view” in the Graphic.ly app needed a WrapPanel, so I added a reference to the Silverlight.Toolkit DLL and got the whole treasure trove of goodies.
Surprise #6 - I am more excited about this platform than I even thought I would be.
There is just something so incredibly personal about being able to hold your own application experience in your hand and be able to interact and manipulate it without an intermediate input device like a mouse or keyboard. Mobile computing experiences is the most exciting area to be developing in right now in terms of creating appropriate and useful user experiences that really affect your daily life. As I spent more time getting familiar with working on these kinds of experiences, it really started to sink in how tangible the reward was.
I’ve been asked countless times by my peers over the last couple of weeks, “so what do you think?” and honestly, my immediate response every time has been that I am actually getting to take the years of experience and skills I have invested my career into to a platform and form factor that really matters to me. This is a platform I will use in every facet of my life and everywhere I go: When I am on vacation and when I am at work. My kids will use it and my parents will use it.
Where it is really easy in other computing experiences to create experience for technologies sake, in mobile computing it is much easier to use technology for experiences sake. It’s just a huge benefit that the technology I already know is .NET and so I am already a Windows Phone developer. (do you hear the echo?)
A few months ago, at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, in Ray Ozzie's keynote, Seesmic introduced a preview release of its Twitter application on Windows (Seesmic for Windows). 
Seesmic has a very active community and got a lot of feedback. Users loved the great experience and wanted to access more social network services from the application. Seesmic also received hundreds of requests from developers who want to integrate their services into the Seesmic clients.
Seesmic Desktop on Silverlight
Seesmic is announcing today a new client application running on Silverlight 4 (Out-Of-Browser) that provides a developer plug-in platform. Seesmic was able to re-use a lot of its Windows application code. ![clip_image002[10]](http://team.silverlight.net/files/media/image/WindowsLiveWriter/6e7dc89bc856_9B82/clip_image00210.gif "clip_image002[10]")
This plug-in platform allows developers to integrate services directly into the application. In fact, all the services pre-loaded in the application, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Bing Twitter Maps or image services TweetPhoto, are all plug-ins.
The Bing Maps plug-in allows users to see geo-located tweets on a map inside the application.
Developers interested in creating a social plug-in can sign up on http://platform.seesmic.com to be notified when it becomes available.
Seesmic for Windows Phone 7 Series
Seesmic’s vision is to provide its social client on broad range of platforms and devices. It is already available on several phones but developing a new application for each platform requires a lot of resources from the startup.
![clip_image002[12]](http://team.silverlight.net/files/media/image/WindowsLiveWriter/6e7dc89bc856_9B82/clip_image002%5B12%5D.gif "clip_image002[12]")
Seesmic demonstrated today its application on Windows Phone 7 Series. It integrates services such as a Bing Maps and its geo-location features and takes advantage of the Windows Phone rich user experience. And since the platform on Windows Phone 7 Series is Silverlight, Seesmic was able to re-use a lot of code of its desktop application, which made the development easier and cheaper than on the other phones.
Great job Seesmic! You can sign up for Team Seesmic now on seesmic.com to be notified when the desktop application on Silverlight become available (it will be soon after the Silverlight 4 release). If you are at MIX in Las Vegas and want to learn more about the plug-in platform, you can also attend the meetup for developers that Seesmic will be running on Tuesday 3/16 at 5:00pm (Tradewinds AB in North convention center (downstairs from MIX))
Major updates to the Project Rosetta site shipped today, including a new a series of Flash to Silverlight tutorials, an updated API Guide with a quick reference list and a full list of recommended tools, code samples and frameworks to download.
Access these new resources via the links provided below:
Getting Started Series: 
API Guide:
This is just the beginning! Keep checking back for new tutorials in the Getting Started series, along with a brand new series of tutorials that go deeper into a single topic.
To keep track of the latest Project Rosetta content and other similar tutorials Follow us on Twitter or get updates via our RSS Feed.
Telerik Corporation, a leading vendor of ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, WinForms and WPF controls and components, as well as .NET Reporting, .NET ORM, .NET CMS solutions and Web Application Testing Tools, is excited to announce RadControls for Silverlight 4 CTP. RadControls for Silverlight 4 CTP is the first UI components suite to natively support Microsoft Silverlight 4 beta and to provide support for the right-click feature introduced with the latest Silverlight release.
RadControls helps to ensure that developers can use RadControls for Silverlight 4 with the latest Silverlight version and start building their applications today. With the Silverlight 4 Beta release, Microsoft announced support for conventional desktop interaction models through new features such as right-click context menu. RadControls for Silverlight 4 benefit from this new addition allowing developers to use RadContextMenu without enabling windowless mode.
RadControls for Silverlight 4 features 38 advanced high-performing UI components loaded with features such as Silverlight Grid, fully customizable Silverlight Charts and Gauges, and Map and Scheduler components to help provide developers with a powerful toolset for building line-of-business Silverlight applications. The controls are engineered for outstanding performance by utilizing streamlined themes and templates, as well as incorporating virtualized scrolling in the more data-centric controls. Furthermore Telerik RadControls for Silverlight ships with several major themes, among which Windows 7 and Vista, helping developers to deliver a consistent look-and-feel throughout their applications.
For more information follow these links:
After a short break, our third Silverlight podcast is now available. This podcast features Sean Hayes of the Microsoft Accessibility Business Unit. It is about accessibility on the web, with Silverlight and the Accessible Media Project.
Listen to the podcast directly from the blog using the embedded player below, or download either the Enhanced AAC version for iPods (audio and images) or the MP3 version (audio only).
Unfortunately, the audio quality is not great but a full transcript is available for download.
By downloading and listening to these podcasts, you agree to our Terms of Use.
An Overview of Deep Zoom Technology
Deep Zoom Composer is a free application that creates either Silverlight or AJAX content that displays images in a fixed area on a web page. Users can pan and zoom within high-resolution images inside this area.
In Deep Zoom Composer, you can take a collection of images of various resolutions and arrange them into a composition. You can then export this composition as either a single high-resolution image or a set of individual images with different resolutions.
Once you export your composition, users with a standard broadband connection can quickly display and navigate a large, detailed image or a panorama of images that might otherwise be extremely slow to view.
To download DeepZoom Composer go here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=457b17b7-52bf-4bda-87a3-fa8a4673f8bf&displaylang=en
For more Deep Zoom examples online, see Seadragon AJAX on Microsoft Live Labs.
http://livelabs.com/seadragon-AJAX/gallery/
How does DeepZoom work?
Deep Zoom Composer uses the Deep Zoom technology found in Microsoft Silverlight 3 and Seadragon AJAX. When you view an image created in Deep Zoom Composer in a browser, the browser downloads only the portion of the image that you are actually viewing on your screen at that time, and at a resolution appropriate to the scale of the image. Downloading only part of the image data at a time decreases the time it takes to load the image and optimizes the viewing experience.
To add Deep Zoom images to a Web page:
1. In Expression Web, click on the page (or the code editor) where you want to insert the DeepZoom image. In the Insert menu, choose Media > Deep Zoom. Alternatively, you can drag a Deep Zoom icon from the Media category of the Toolbox panel.
2. Locate the DeepZoom folder where the DeepZoom Composer saved the Silverlight project file. Double-click this folder, then navigate several folders down into the following directory: DeepZoomProjectWeb > ClientBin > GeneratedImages and select the dzc_output file. This is an XML file needed by Expression Web to pull all of the DeepZoom components together. Click Open and the Insert Deep Zoom window appears.
3. In the Insert Method category, choose: Silverlight only to insert only the Silverlight Deep Zoom image.
Note: Choose Autodetect to insert JavaScript that will detect if the user's browser can display Silverlight. If it can't, the Seadragon AJAX Deep Zoom image will be displayed.
The Display dimensions should be set to the size of the DeepZoom image on the Web page. For example, if you want the DeepZoom image on the Web page to be 320x460 pixels, enter those dimensions here. The Zoom Speed slider determines how quickly the Deep Zoom image zooms in and out in response to the button controls or the mouse wheel.
4. Click OK and the Deep Zoom content will be inserted. It may take a few moments to process.
5. Save your changes and choose File > Preview in Browser; you now have your Deep Zoom image embedded in the Web page.
Deep Zoom Features
Now, take a look at the Deep Zoom features.
1. Place your cursor over the DeepZoom image and, if you have a mouse, scroll upwards to zoom into the image. As you zoom in, you can reposition the images by clicking in the direction you want.
2. Users who might be on a laptop, for example, can always pan by clicking and dragging the mouse. There is also alternative navigation automatically added in the bottom right corner of the Deep Zoom image. The plus and the minus buttons allow users to zoom in and out.
3. Click the Home button and the composition is restored to the default view.
4. Click the last button to place the Deep Zoom Composition into full screen view. Press Esc when you want to exit.
For more information on how to add Silverlight content to your Web site, here is a set of tutorials that covers this example.
For a free 60-day trial of Expression Web 3, click here.
Please tell us what you think about Expression Web 3.
Our second Silverlight podcast features an interview with James Clarke of the Expression Encoder team. Learn about how Encoder works, screen capture and its object model.
Introducing the Silverlight Podcast series, which we’ll use to go deep on features and projects. In this first installment, Silverlight Senior Product Manager David Sayed and IIS Senior Program Manager Chris Knowlton talk about IIS7 Media Services 3.0, which powers Smooth Streaming.
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