Professional Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Applications and Games Using Visual Studio, Silverlight®, and XNA®

Chapter 3. Designing Layouts Using Red Threads

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER

• What the Red Threads are and how they apply to building Windows Phone applications

• How to find and use the standard Windows Phone controls

• Adjusting the layout of your application

• How to apply styles, templates, and themes to your controls

One of the biggest changes in the last few years has been the advent of the declarative XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) — based user interface. Originally introduced as part of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), XAML is now the markup language behind Silverlight both for the Desktop (via the Web) and Windows Phone. XAML not only includes a base set of controls, but also the ability to restyle and theme them. You can also create your own controls from scratch, and, as the rendering is vector-driven, you can be sure that your controls will scale as your application adapts to different screen resolutions and orientations.

As part of creating the Metro user experience, Microsoft kept to three design principles, which they refer to as Red Threads. In this chapter, you will learn about the default set of controls that ship with Silverlight, how to style them and use the Windows Phone themes, and how to use the three Red Threads to guide you as you build your user experience.

RED THREADS

So far you have learned about the Metro design language and how Windows Phone has been optimized for life maximizers, such as Anna and Miles. The challenge is to take this knowledge and ...