In this episode, Corrina continues the Design Tips miniseries by sharing her insights on how to use wireframes to improve the design and development process for Windows Phone applications. She walks through why wireframeing is an important part of the process of creating a WP7 application. Corrina talks about the advantages of using wireframing and walks step by step through creating wireframes. Special Note: From the crew of Silverlight TV and Channel 9, we want to extend a special thank...

Sundara Kumar and Mark Harper work on the new custom markup extensions (CME) feature in Silverlight 5. They explain how CME's allow you to extend XAML so that you can run any custom code. These guys (along with some other members of the team) literally wrote the feature. Mark was also instrumental in writing the CME that I used in many Silverlight 5 demos to hook events up to a method in a ViewModel. Relevant links: John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa) Custom Markup Extension sampleFollow...

Sundara Kumar and Mark Harper work on the new custom markup extensions (CME) feature in Silverlight 5. They explain how CME's allow you to extend XAML so that you can run any custom code. These guys (along with some other members of the team) literally wrote the feature. Mark was also instrumental in writing the CME that I used in many Silverlight 5 demos to hook events up to a method in a ViewModel. Relevant links: John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa) Custom Markup Extension sampleFollow...

In this episode, Dave Crawford and Tom Eddings visit from the UK to contribute to the Design Tips miniseries. Dave and Tom have tremendous amounts of experience helping to create great UX for Windows Phone 7 applications in the marketplace. Topics they cover include tips on: how, when, and where to use (and not use) a Panorama control avoiding specific types of buttons and associations best practices for the Web Browser control, RichText, and the IE Web Browser itself how to make your brand...

In this episode, Dave Crawford and Tom Eddings visit from the UK to contribute to the Design Tips miniseries. Dave and Tom have tremendous amounts of experience helping to create great UX for Windows Phone 7 applications in the marketplace. Topics they cover include tips on: how, when, and where to use (and not use) a Panorama control avoiding specific types of buttons and associations best practices for the Web Browser control, RichText, and the IE Web Browser itself how to make your brand...

In this episode, Jesse Liberty explains how Reactive Extensions work with Silverlight and Windows Phone. In order to simplify the code, Jesse suggests using Reactive Extensions whenever you are deep into using asynchronous programming. He covers exactly what Reactive Extensions are, why you'd want to use them (or not), how they relate to LINQ, and what you should know before using them. And of course, Jesse offers some tips and tricks. Relevant links: John's Blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)...

In this episode, Jesse Liberty explains how Reactive Extensions work with Silverlight and Windows Phone. In order to simplify the code, Jesse suggests using Reactive Extensions whenever you are deep into using asynchronous programming. He covers exactly what Reactive Extensions are, why you'd want to use them (or not), how they relate to LINQ, and what you should know before using them. And of course, Jesse offers some tips and tricks. Relevant links: John's Blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)...

Ever bang your head against a wall trying to figure out what's wrong with your data binding XAML? If so, then you will love the new data binding debugging features in Silverlight 5. In this episode of Silverlight TV, Jason Shaver joins John to discuss the data binding debugging features in Silverlight 5. They walk through how it works, the information that is exposed to you, and how to set various conditional breakpoints as well. Setting breakpoints on binding expressions Creating conditional...

Ever bang your head against a wall trying to figure out what's wrong with your data binding XAML? If so, then you will love the new data binding debugging features in Silverlight 5. In this episode of Silverlight TV, Jason Shaver joins John to discuss the data binding debugging features in Silverlight 5. They walk through how it works, the information that is exposed to you, and how to set various conditional breakpoints as well. Setting breakpoints on binding expressions Creating conditional...

In this episode, Corrina continues the Design Tips miniseries by sharing her insights on how to create tiles and splash screens for Windows Phone applications. She walks through the process of creating an icon in Expression Design and how to make tiles look good and quickly mesh with Metro. Corrina then shows how to create a splash screen and gives some good tips on how to make the splash screen provide a better user experience. Finally, she walks through some tips to help with working with...

In this episode, Corrina continues the Design Tips miniseries by sharing her insights on how to create tiles and splash screens for Windows Phone applications. She walks through the process of creating an icon in Expression Design and how to make tiles look good and quickly mesh with Metro. Corrina then shows how to create a splash screen and gives some good tips on how to make the splash screen provide a better user experience. Finally, she walks through some tips to help with working with...

This week Aaron Oneal, program manager of the Silverlight 3D efforts, joins John to discuss the 3D APIs in Silverlight 5 beta. Aaron was instrumental in working on the 3D features and helped to create the 3D Solar Wind and 3D HouseBuilder demos. Aaron reviews the features and explores how they all work by demoing the Solar Wind sample application. This is a great walk through of a nice app that you can apply to your own 3D efforts.Relevant links: John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)...

This week Aaron Oneal, program manager of the Silverlight 3D efforts, joins John to discuss the 3D APIs in Silverlight 5 beta. Aaron was instrumental in working on the 3D features and helped to create the 3D Solar Wind and 3D HouseBuilder demos. Aaron reviews the features and explores how they all work by demoing the Solar Wind sample application. This is a great walk through of a nice app that you can apply to your own 3D efforts.Relevant links: John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)...

Interested in creating a game for Windows Phone using Silverlight? In this episode, Jeff Paries, Silverlight MVP and author of the book Silverlight Animation, walks through the source for his Bird Hunt game for Windows Phone 7. He offers tips on how to create a game concept and keep your scope manageable while effectively dividing the game aspects into manageable pieces. Jeff covers the game concept, the six objects in the game, the game loop, and the animates/visual states. You can download...

Interested in creating a game for Windows Phone using Silverlight? In this episode, Jeff Paries, Silverlight MVP and author of the book Silverlight Animation, walks through the source for his Bird Hunt game for Windows Phone 7. He offers tips on how to create a game concept and keep your scope manageable while effectively dividing the game aspects into manageable pieces. Jeff covers the game concept, the six objects in the game, the game loop, and the animates/visual states. You can download...

Susan shares her insights on how to do quick and dirty UX testing to help your application be more successful. Susan (who works with great people on the UX team, including Corrina Black, Tsitsi Gora, and Arturo Toledo) has a lot of experience working on usability and spends a lot of time working with designers and application users to help determine what makes a good user experience for products like Visual Studio, Silverlight, and Windows Phone apps. In this episode, Susan discusses the...

Susan shares her insights on how to do quick and dirty UX testing to help your application be more successful. Susan (who works with great people on the UX team, including Corrina Black, Tsitsi Gora, and Arturo Toledo) has a lot of experience working on usability and spends a lot of time working with designers and application users to help determine what makes a good user experience for products like Visual Studio, Silverlight, and Windows Phone apps. In this episode, Susan discusses the...

In this episode, Deepesh Mohnani of the WCF RIA Services team discusses all of the new features introduced since the initial RIA Services release. These include expanded localization support, improved MVVM support, Windows Azure table storage, datetimeoffset, operation tag, jQuery client, and more. Deepesh dives deep into how to use custom code generation, complex types, and shared entities. He also hints at possible EF Code First support in the near future. Relevant links: John's blog and on...

In this episode, Deepesh Mohnani of the WCF RIA Services team discusses all of the new features introduced since the initial RIA Services release. These include expanded localization support, improved MVVM support, Windows Azure table storage, datetimeoffset, operation tag, jQuery client, and more. Deepesh dives deep into how to use custom code generation, complex types, and shared entities. He also hints at possible EF Code First support in the near future. Relevant links: John's blog and on...

Laurent Bugnion of IdentityMine appears on the show to discuss his latest additions to the MVVM Light toolkit for both Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone. Laurent covers several new features, including IoC (Inversion of Control) containers, new ways to implement INotifyPropertyChanged using lambdas and/or reflection, and changes to the Messenger class. Relevant links: John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa) Laurent's blog and on Twitter (@lbugnion) Get MVVM Light Laurent's videos...

Laurent Bugnion of IdentityMine appears on the show to discuss his latest additions to the MVVM Light toolkit for both Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone. Laurent covers several new features, including IoC (Inversion of Control) containers, new ways to implement INotifyPropertyChanged using lambdas and/or reflection, and changes to the Messenger class. Relevant links: John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa) Laurent's blog and on Twitter (@lbugnion) Get MVVM Light Laurent's videos...

Want to optimize how a list of images loads and scrolls in your Windows Phone application? Jobi Joy, UX Architect with IdentityMine and key contributor to the IRC chat app in the MIX11 Day 2 keynote, returns to discuss with John how he handles image scenarios such as this, as well as how he ekes out extra performance. Jobi has a blog post that explains how such optimization works by using virtualization, caching via Isolated Storage, and working with both preview and full size images. I won’t...

Want to optimize how a list of images loads and scrolls in your Windows Phone application? Jobi Joy, UX Architect with IdentityMine and key contributor to the IRC chat app in the MIX11 Day 2 keynote, returns to discuss with John how he handles image scenarios such as this, as well as how he ekes out extra performance. Jobi has a blog post that explains how such optimization works by using virtualization, caching via Isolated Storage, and working with both preview and full size images. I won’t...