One of the most beautiful design aspects of the Windows Phone OS is the use of motion design. Windows Phone is alive with motion, which acts as a huge differentiator in quality applications. Unfortunately, motion design can be very painstaking work and difficult to implement. Fortunately the Windows Phone Toolkit has everything we need to implement powerful animations that bring your Windows Phone apps to life. In this video Shawn Oster walks us through the steps of adding the Windows Phone Toolkit and utilizing the transitions and tilt animations to make your app feel like a native part of the ecosystem. To summarize our conversation, you can very easily add the basic page transition animation to your app in literally about 2 minutes. Step 1: Install the Windows Phone Toolkit, or simple add the toolkit to your project using Nuget. Note: If Nuget fails, check to see if an update is available from Tools > Extensions and Updates, under Updates > Visual Studio Gallery. You need Nuget >= version 2.1 to work with Windows Phone projects. Step 2: (and we forgot to mention this in the video): In App.xaml.cs, locate: RootFrame = new PhoneApplicationFrame; and replace it with RootFrame = new TransitionFrame(); Step 3: At the top of each page on which you want the transition to be used: a. If the toolkit namespace is not defined, add it, (it will automatically be added if you have added any toolkit controls to the page previously): xmlns:toolkit="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;

assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit" Finally, add the following block fo XAML to each page, (above the LayoutRoot),

In this week's Inside Windows Phone we talk about Location and Mapping in Windows Phone 8. In this video we cover The basics of location and mapping The power of Windows Phone location and mapping APIs including simple ways to do distance calculations, reverse geocoding (get an address from a latitude/longitude), mapping routes (both walking and driving) and how to point users to download offline maps to drive a powerful mapping experience available worldwide even in the absence of network connectivity. All code from this video is available here. Getting started with location in Windows Phone takes about 5 minutes. Windows Phone Location and Mapping in 5 Minutes Minute 1: Enable your app for mapping and location tracking. Open up a new Windows Phone 8 project. Double-click on the WMAppManifest.xml file Go to the Capabilities tab and check the ID_CAP_LOCATION and ID_CAP_MAP capabilities. This gives you application permission to use the location APIs and the Map control. Minute 2: Add a map control. Open up your MainPage.xaml in either Visual Studio or Blend. Go to the Toolbox in Visual Studio or the Assets pane in Blend and type "Map" in the search box. Double click or click-and-drag to add it to your XAML control. In Visual Studio 2012: In Blend for VS 2012 Minute 3: Get your location Open up MainPage.xaml.cs (also known as your code-behind). Add a Geolocator variable and initialize it in your constructor. You will need to add Windows.Devices.Geolocation as a reference. Geolocator locator;

public MainPage()

{

InitializeComponent();

locator = new Geolocator();

this.Loaded += MainPage_Loaded;

} Change your MainPage_Loaded to enable await operations by adding "async" before "void" and add the following code: async void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

try

{

Geoposition myLocation = await locator.GetGeopositionAsync();

GeoCoordinate geoCord = new GeoCoordinate(

In the world of Windows Phone development, the cornerstone app architecture is called MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel). In this video, I talk through some of the structure of an MVVM application to talk about how we build MVVM apps for the phone to take advantage of benefits like data binding, commanding and ViewModel portability. MVVM is an enormous topic. In addition to this video, you should take a look at the following articles, videos and blog posts to learn more about the why and the how of MVVM. These two posts are targeted at Windows Phone Mango (7.5) but all the code carries across to Windows Phone 8 as well. Getting Started with MVVM in 10 minutes Building a Reusable ICommand implementation for Windows Phone MVVM apps Laurent Bugnion, who leads the fantastic MVVM Light Toolkit project, has a 4-article MSDN series on MVVM IOC Containers and MVVM Messenger and View Services in MVVM Maximizing the Visual Designer's Usage with Design-Time Data Commands, RelayCommands and EventToCommand And finally, more videos: Designing Awesome XAML apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 (Build 2012) Create Cross-Platform Apps using Portable Class Libraries (Build 2012) Understanding the Model-View-ViewModel pattern (MIX10) Deep Dive MVVM (MIX 11)

One of the really exciting things about Windows Phone development is how enormously flexible it is. With Windows Phone 8, in addition to supporting native (C++) and managed (C#) development, the platform is the perfect place to develop apps using HTML5. Jeff Burtoft, an HTML5 technical evangelist with Microsoft, joins us this week to talk about the flexibility and cross-platform power of HTML5 in the context of Windows Phone. The in-depth example that we cover in the video is a project called YetiBowl, and standards compliant HTML5 game that runs flawlessly on the web, as a Windows 8 app and as a Windows Phone 8 app. Make sure you check out Jeff's 4 part series on creating the HTML5 Yeti game you see in this episode. Yeti Bowl Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 What makes all this possible is Internet Explorer 10 on Windows Phone 8. IE10 for the phone and the PC are built on the same engine and use the same renderer which means that what you see on your desktop (or tablet) is what you'll see on your phone. Additionally, the web browser control in Windows Phone apps is a full instance of IE10, with the same speed and power as the native phone browser. There are lots of great libraries and products that make developing for Windows Phone 8 in HTML5 a blast. PhoneGap - PhoneGap is for building cross-platform apps using HTML5. They support Windows Phone 8 with a great Visual Studio template to get started in no time. And don't miss our PhoneGap porting challenge with great opportunities prizes available for PhoneGap developers. Atari Arcade - Great HTML5 games that re-imagine the some of the classic Atari games. Get the source code and get coding! Internet Explorer Test Drive - great examples of what is possible using IE 10. CreateJS - A great library for building rich experiences in HTML5 that work beautifully on Windows Phone. ProcessingJS for Windows and Windows Phone - The ProcessingJS library uses HTML5 canvas to create digital art, simple games and visualiz

Download the sample project seen in this video. Data binding is one of the fundamental concepts for good Windows Phone application design but can be difficult to grasp for newcomers. The core concept is this: No one wants to manually update the user interface elements. I want my UI to automatically reflect the state of my application and data binding helps us do this. We can work exclusively on our Windows Phone UI, bind the values in the UI and then work on the inner logic of the application knowing that all the updates are being reflected to the user. Because of the power in the model you see in this video and post, there are some really great "fringe" benefits in terms of interaction and design that we get along with the core benefits. So let's build our first data binding. By a happy coincidence, this can also be our first ViewModel from scratch. I use Visual Studio snippets in the video and in "real life" because it's substantially faster and I have a very poor memory. You can download the notify property snippets I used here. Just extract them into your "Documents\Visual Studio 2012\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets" folder and you should be ready to go. As a "first steps" post, we're going to go through how to build a data binding step by step. To see this model in action, just open up a new My First Data Binding In our app, lets create a new ViewModel. I right-clicked in the ViewModel folder and went to "App -> Class..." and created just an empty Class file named "SampleViewModel.cs". This class now looks like this: class SampleViewModel

{

} We update it to implement the INotifyPropertyChanged event by declaring that interface and using the "notifyInterface" snippet. Hit Alt-Shift-F10 to resolve any refrerences (specifically the System.ComponentModel) and our code should now look like this: public class SampleViewModel : INotifyPropertyChanged

{

public event PropertyChang