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 you to all of our viewers. With your support we recently surpassed 4 million views of Silverlight TV! We've learned a lot, and with BUILD just around the corner, it's time to refocus the show a bit. Silverlight TV is taking a late summer hiatus... stay tuned for BUILD, where you'll see what's next. Relevant links: John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa) Corrina on Twitter (@corrinab) Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

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 us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

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 shine through Relevant links: John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa) Dave on Twitter (@ThatUXGuy) Windows Phone Photoshop design templatesUX Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7Panorama design tips from the WP7 Team here and here The Noun Project WP7 Icons (thanks to Laurent Bugnion and Shawn Wildermuth) Brandon Watson on Twitter (@BrandonWatson) and his WP7 challenge to Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

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) Jesse's blog and on Twitter (@jesseliberty) Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

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 breakpoints to break when errors occur Setting breakpoints when objects are null Relevant links: John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa) Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

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 gradients. This video is packed with tips from Corrina, including some great keyboard shortcuts she uses when working with Expression Design. The main topics Corrina covers are: Importing photos and using them as a stencil for icons Creating a good splash screen that meshes with your app Simple gradient color solutions Relevant links: John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa) Susan's blog and on Twitter (@susantoddux) Corrina on Twitter (@corrinab) Arturo's blog and on Twitter (@arturot) Tsitsi's blog and on Twitter (@tsitsigora) Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

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) Aaron's blog and on Twitter (@aaron_oneal) Shawn Hargreaves' blog on game programming with XNA Solar Wind sample app Housebuilder demo Babylon Engine and Toolkit Balder 3D engine Silverlight.net Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

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 Bird Hunt now from the Windows Phone marketplace. Relevant links: John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa) Jeff's blog and on Twitter (@jeffparies) Source code for Bird Hunt on codeplexFollow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

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 following quick and easy ways to improve UX: Cognitive Walkthrough (does your work flow make sense to the user?) Heuristic Evaluations (testing the UI for consistency, visual design, communication, ease, error prevention) Valuable Usability Studies (choosing your audience, how many people, how to operate them) Relevant links: John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa) Susan's blog on Twitter (@susantoddux) Grey Matter Trivia game Corrina on Twitter (@corrinab) Arturo's blog on Twitter (@arturot) Tsitsi's blog on Twitter (@tsitsigora) Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

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 Twitter (@john_papa) Deepesh's Blog and on Twitter (@deepeshm) More about RIA ServicesRIA Services Forums Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv