When hanging a picture frame, we typically strive to make it look straight, making sure all edges are aligned to the adjacent walls and ceiling. A crooked frame disturbs layout order and draws our attention. Incorporating new elements to an existing space...

Next week we will be in San Francisco for the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference .  It’s a big conference with lots of attendees expected.  Microsoft will have a number of people there to connect with developers and partners and will be throwing...

There are more than a few very successful mobile applications that use the accelerometer as the main user input. Most commonly used in driving or flying simulation games, the accelerometer in mobile devices is a very powerful tool. But there are other...

There have been a number of discussions about Push Notification connections and in particular the “OK/Received/Connected/Active” and “OK/Received/Temporarily Disconnected/Active” states.  We’d like to take a few moments in this blog post to review...

This post is a summary of a talk the Windows Phone Design Team has given a couple times recently, on the history and the future of the Metro design language. In November, myself and Albert Shum drove a few hours north to visit our friends at the Vancouver...

By design, your Windows Phone application should load and run (display something to the user) as soon as possible—not simply to comply with the Windows Phone Marketplace certification process, but primarily to ensure a better user experience. Users hate...

Today, in partnership with Telerik and PreEmptive Solutions, we are launching an offer for user groups and their developers. The offer includes the following: Controls from Telerik that will help you create a great app Analytics from PreEmptive...

Interaction on a mobile device utilizes a series of finger gestures. Flicking, panning, pinching and tapping, for example, all require finger gestures to successfully navigate an experience. Given the amount of common controls provided by WP7, interactive...

On Friday Feb 11th our two companies announced a partnership that we believe will shake up the mobile phone market. Together Nokia and Microsoft are bringing to bear significant and complementary strengths in global smartphone and mobile phone market...

By now you’ve likely heard about the announcement of our partnership with Nokia. I’m incredibly excited about its long-term potential and how it could enable us to innovate, differentiate, and combine strengths to build a new global ecosystem...

One of the most popular pages in the Windows Phone 7 documentation is the Code Samples topic. On this page you can find a series of code samples that demonstrate various features of Windows Phone 7. But somewhat hidden away at the bottom of the topic...

New years are fun. They remind you that there are so many opportunities, and that the good stuff is still in front of you. As we roll into 2011, we wanted to update you on some new opportunities on Windows Phone. First, today we are releasing the Windows...

It has been a while since we updated the Windows Phone Training Kit and we are happy to announce that today we release updates (bug fix) and few new labs. As usual, you can download the full kit, or just the Silverlight or XNA framework labs. The online...

Windows Phone 7 represents the convergence of many Microsoft® technologies into a single product. In addition to the phone-specific API, applications can utilize APIs from Bing, Xbox Live, Silverlight, the XNA Framework, C#, and Visual Basic. There are...