It was recently brought to my attention that we have done a poor job of evangelizing the Windows Phone Design Guidelines on MSDN . These guidelines were previously available in PDF format, but a few months ago a couple of folks worked really hard to bring...(read more)

31 Weeks of Windows Phone Design Index In this post we’ll try to answer a very common question that developers and designers ask us all the time and that in fact we in the Studio try to define always when exploring new features in Windows Phone...(read more)

31 Weeks of Windows Phone Design Index Introduction Today we begin our preparation to get ourselves ready to define the Information Architecture (IA) for our app. We will discuss Information Architecture more in depth in a future (not too far away post...(read more)

by Andrea Boschin There is not any doubt, the first thing you meet when you use Windows Phone are the tiles. These are the large squares on the home screen that identifies some applications and they are also a distinguishable character that make your...(read more)

31 Weeks of Windows Phone Design Index In the previous post, The Design Process of a Windows Phone App, we discussed the importance of defining a theme for your Windows Phone application. The ideation stage helps you refine your theme and generate ideas...(read more)

by Gill Cleeren Introduction to the series Welcome to this first part of a whole series on Windows 8 articles, which I’ll be writing over the coming weeks and months. It’s my goal in this series to introduce you to what we know at this point about Windows...(read more)

The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WinRT XAML , WPF , Silverlight , Visual C++ , XNA , Expression Blend , Surface , Windows 7 , Windows Phone , Visual Studio, WCF RIA Services...(read more)

A reader of my Silverlight 5 book recently reached out to me about threading and why I create some objects on the UI thread in the examples. We discussed some of the reasons, but I felt this would be a good topic to share with everyone. In fact, this...(read more)

I recently posted an updated version of Silverlight reporting on codeplex . Here's the overview. This project, a unofficial project by Pete Brown of Microsoft, provides a a very basic framework for building simple, short, multi-page reports using Silverlight...(read more)

Here is a proposed design process for Windows Phone apps that I’ve been using. While many of these are conventional design process stages, I’m trying to explain them from a Windows Phone app point of view specifically. This post is about the...(read more)

Hello! - Thank you so much EVERYONE for the amazing response to this series! - it just shows how much more design guidance is needed out there and we in the Design Studio will continue to put together articles and design resources for you. Thanks for...(read more)

Metro Design Principles We usually refer to “Metro” as the UI design style Microsoft is using in their platform and the one Microsoft is exposing for developers and designers to create apps for Windows Phone (I’m focusing on Windows...(read more)

The main difference from the Silverlight 4 version is I've added a section on trusted in browser apps (which in many ways aren't that different from trusted out of browser apps). I've also folded in a few corrections/improvements from customer feedback...(read more)

We recently made a refresh of the Windows Phone documentation and samples. We've updated several samples: Background Agent Background Transfer Service Quick Card Search Extensibility We also added the following new sample that shows how to use types in...(read more)

In this article, a discussion about several new features that did not fit in any of the above categories. We will discuss In-Browser HTML, PostScript and Tasks for TPL. Please review the Roadmap for the series before going any further. The Roadmap for...(read more)

Silverlight 5 supports multiple playback rates. When Playback rate is set a rate that does not support audio playback, audio will be muted. If playback is reset back to 1 or to any value that supports audio playback after multiple rates that don’t...(read more)

If you are a Windows Phone developer, there are some properties offered on the Binding object in SIlverlight 4, which is supported by Mango. Thse properties were not offered in Silverlight 3/Windows Phone OS 7.0. The SL4 binding properties make setting...(read more)

If you are a Windows Phone developer, there are some properties offered on the Binding object in SIlverlight 4, which is supported by Mango. Thse properties were not offered in Silverlight 3/Windows Phone OS 7.0. The SL4 binding properties make setting...(read more)

This talk was an adaptation of two chapters from Silverlight 5 in Action. I started with a brief explanation of REST, and then explained the solution we were going to build during the session. The idea was to show how you can use REST in place of the...(read more)

Silverlight Show has two new articles that provide some really interesting info about building Windows 8 XAML Metro Apps with OData written by Samidip Basu ( @samidip ). Windows 8 XAML Metro Apps with OData - Part 1 Windows 8 XAML Metro Apps with OData...(read more)