Windows Phone - tutorial.wmlcloud.com

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Developing for Windows Phone and Xbox Live : Device States (part 2) - DepthStencilState

Each time a new pixel is rendered, the system checks whether a depth is written for the position already. If it is, it compares the depth of the current pixel with the one that is already stored, and depending on the function of the depth buffer (which is discussed later), it decides what to do with it.

Developing for Windows Phone and Xbox Live : Device States (part 1) - BlendState

At a high level, the blend operation is little more than taking two colors, performing some operation on them, and returning a third blended color

Developing for Windows Phone and Xbox Live : Using SkinnedEffect

Animation for a particular model is normally stored within the model itself and is included when you are importing and processing the model. However, by default, you won’t be able to get this data at runtime, so you need to build a content processor to store this data.

Developing for Windows Phone and Xbox Live : Using AlphaTestEffect & Using EnvironmentMapEffect

Environment maps are done by rendering a cube texture (the TextureCube class) as a reflection over any objects that need to have the reflection. A cube texture is (as the name implies) a texture that covers a cube, so it has six different faces.

Developing for Windows Phone and Xbox Live : Using the Effect Interfaces & Using DualTextureEffect

BasicEffect implements three different interfaces that are generic enough to be used by multiple types of effects. Each of the built-in effects in Game Studio 4.0 uses at least one of these interfaces, and your own custom effects could also.

Developing for Windows Phone and Xbox Live : Using BasicEffect (part 2) - Textures, Vertex Colors, and Fog

The basic effect also handles rendering a texture. If the model you are loading from the content pipeline includes textures, they are included as part of your model and rendered automatically.

Developing for Windows Phone and Xbox Live : Using BasicEffect (part 1) - Basic Lighting

Notice that all colors used in the built-in effects are not Color objects, but vector objects. The x, y, and z components of the vector object map to the red, green, and blue color components where 0.0f is fully off and 1.0f is fully on.

Developing for Windows Phone and Xbox Live : Camera Types & Models

Although any individual game probably has only a single type of camera, there are a wide variety that can be used—cameras that follow the players, cameras that never move, and cameras that change depending on the circumstances...the possibilities are endless.

Developing for Windows Phone and Xbox Live : Projection Matrix

Compared to the view matrix, the projection matrix is much more difficult to explain! When thinking of the view matrix as the camera, you can think of the projection matrix as the lens.

Developing for Windows Phone and Xbox Live : View Matrix

The view matrix is the easiest to visually conceptualize, as it has only three components: the position of the camera in world space, where the camera looks, and what direction is up.

Programming Windows Phone 7 : Pivot and Panorama - The XNA Music Classes: MediaPlayer

To display music from the music library you use the XNA MediaLibrary and related classes. To actually play that music you use the static XNA MediaPlayer class.

Programming Windows Phone 7 : Pivot and Panorama - Displaying the Albums

When the program starts up, MainPage is displayed. The XAML file contains XML namespace declarations for “controls” (to access the Pivot control) and “local” (for MusicPresenter).

Programming Windows Phone 7 : Pivot and Panorama - The XNA Music Classes: MediaLibrary

An application that wants to play music under Windows Phone 7 uses classes from the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media namespace.

Programming Windows Phone 7 : Pivot and Panorama - The XNA Connection

A Silverlight program can get access to the phone’s photo library for retrieving photos and saving them, but it needs to use an XNA class named MediaLibrary in the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media namespace.

Programming Windows Phone 7 : Pivot and Panorama - Music by Composer

The PivotItem for each composer contains a ListBox where each item includes the thumbnail album art, the album title (without the composer name) using the phone’s current accent color, and the artist associated with the album in the foreground color.

Programming Windows Phone 7 : Pivot and Panorama - Compare and Contrast

The Pivot control expects to contain items of type PivotItem while the Panorama control expects to contain items of type PanoramaItem.

Programming Windows Phone 7 : Elements and Properties - Modes of Opacity

UIElement defines an Opacity property that you can set to a value between 0 and 1 to make an element (and its children) more or less transparent.

Programming Windows Phone 7 : Elements and Properties - Non-Tiled Tile Brushes & Playing Movies

Almost as easy as displaying bitmaps is playing a movie. However, due to their size, video files are almost never included in an executable and almost always are played from a web connection

Programming Windows Phone 7 : Items Controls - A Card File Metaphor

OverlapPanel defines an Orientation property and arranges its children either horizontally or vertically. If OverlapPanel is arranging its children horizontally, each child is positioned slightly to the right of the child before it, leaving the left-most sliver of the previous child visible.

Programming Windows Phone 7 : Items Controls - The DataTemplate Bar Chart

Let’s create a new project, and include references and XML namespace declarations for both the Petzold.Phone.Silverlight and ElPasoHighSchool libraries. Set properties in the root tag of MainPage.xaml for landscape. Put the StudentBodyPresenter in the Resources collection.

Programming Windows Phone 7 : Items Controls - Changing the Panel

One of the essential elements used to display the items is a panel of some sort. By default, this is a StackPanel (or, with ListBox, a VirtualizingStackPanel) with a vertical orientation

Programming Windows Phone 7 : Items Controls - Sorting

The SortDescription object indicates that we want to sort by the LastName property in an ascending order. Since this LastName property is of type string, no additional code need be provided to support sorting.

Items Controls : Fun with DataTemplates

To play along, you can create a new project, set a reference to the ElPasoHighSchool library, and in the XAML file add an XML namespace declaration for that library and instantiate the StudentBodyPresenter class in the Resources collection

Items Controls : Databases and Business Objects

The Students property is of type ObservableCollection, which of course implements IEnumerable, which is all that ListBox really requires for its ItemsSource. But ListBox also determines if the object bound to ItemsSource can do a little more, for example, if it implements INotifyCollectionChanged, which ObservableCollection does.

Items Controls : Binding to ItemsSource

The ItemsSource property is of type IEnumerable so you can pretty much use any collection type, including a simple array.

Items Controls : ListBox Selection

A SelectionChanged event is fired when the selection changes. This event implies that SelectedItem is a good choice for a binding source. SelectedItem is backed by a dependency property, so it can also serve as a binding target.

Items Controls : Customizing Item Displays

The ItemsControlsFromXaml project uses this approach to fill an ItemsControl and two ListBox controls. The Items property defined by ItemsControl is the content property of the control, so in XAML all you need to do is put a bunch of objects between the begin and end tags of the particular items control.

Items Controls and Visual Trees

The code method is demonstrated by the ItemsControlsFromCode project. The program is intended to be displayed in a landscape orientation. It instantiates an ItemsControl, a ListBox, and a ComboBox in three columns of the content Grid

The Two Templates : Custom Controls

If you’re creating controls that need only be used for special purposes in your own applications, the easiest approach is UserControl. Simply define a visual tree for the control in the XAML file.

The Two Templates : The Ever-Handy Thumb

Thumb derives from Control, defines an IsDragging method, and three events: DragStarted, DragDelta, and DragCompleted. A CancelDrag method lets you abort the process midway through.

The Two Templates : Variations on the Slider

The Slider has one of the more complex templates in all of standard Silverlight, and for that reason, it’s important to get familiar with it—particularly if you’re not a big fan of the default Slider template implemented in Windows Phone 7.

The Two Templates : Custom Controls in a Library

Generally when you create a custom control, you define some new properties for the control as well as a default Style and ControlTemplate, and you put that new control in a DLL for sharing among multiple applications.

The Two Templates : Sharing and Reusing Styles and Templates

Generally if you want to apply some changes to an existing ControlTemplate, you obtain a copy of that entire template and begin editing it. These default templates are generally included with Silverlight documentation

The Two Templates : The Visual State Manager

All this time that the Button has been redesigned with a template, it has otherwise remained a fully-functional button and it’s been generating Click events every time it’s been tapped. The big problem is that the Button does not deliver visual feedback to the user. It has a customized visual appearance, but that appearance does not change.

The Two Templates : ControlTemplate Basics

A DataTemplate allows you to customize the display of content in a ContentControl. The ControlTemplate—which you can set to the Template property of any Control—allows you to customize the appearance of the control itself—what’s commonly referred to as the control “chrome.”

The Two Templates : Examining the Visual Tree

The ButtonTree program lets you dump the visual tree for a rather conventional Button (one with its Content just set to text), a Button with its Content property set to an Image element, and two others with their Content properties set to the RadialGradientBrush and Clock (as shown in the examples above) together with a ContentTemplate.

The Two Templates : ContentControl and DataTemplate

If the object set to the Content property of a ControlControl does not derive from FrameworkElement, it is rendered with its ToString method, and if the class has no ToString override, the fully-qualified class name is displayed.

Animations : Animations and Property Precedence

After the animation has concluded, you’ll discover that you can now manipulate the Slider both manually and with the first two buttons. This behavior is not correct and not in accordance with documentation

Animations : Animating Perspective Transforms

Affine transforms are very well behaved and just a little dull: Straight lines are always transformed to straight lines, ellipses are always transformed to ellipses, and squares are always transformed to parallelograms.

Animations : The Easing Functions

Defining key frames with splines is easy in one sense—there are only four numbers involved—but also hard: You need to approximate a certain desired effect with a Bézier spline, and that’s not always obvious.

Animations : The Bouncing Ball Problem

The ball has a TranslateTransform applied to it: the X property is fixed to keep the ball horizontally centered; the Y property is animated between 50 and 600 and back again

Animations : Splines and Key Frames

Conceptually, during the course of the key frame, the X coordinate of this spline represents normalized time, which changes linearly from 0 to 1. The Y coordinate is the normalized value of the animation, also changing from 0 to 1 but in a non-linear fashion.

Animations : Animating Attached Properties (or Not)

You can use Silverlight animations in a couple different ways to move an element around the screen. One way is to target a TranslateTransform set to the element’s RenderTransform property

Animations : Trigger on Loaded

WPF includes objects called triggers, which respond to event firings or to changes in properties and which can start animations going entirely in XAML, eliminating the need for the code-behind file to start the Storyboard.

Animations : Key Frame Animations

If you like the idea of giving the user some visual feedback from a button, but the 360° spin is just a bit too ostentatious, perhaps jiggling the button a little might be more polite.

Animations : A Cautionary Tale

Silverlight has three built-in features that can help you visualize performance issues. Although you can use these on the phone emulator, the emulator tends to run faster than the actual phone, so you’re not getting a true view of performance anyway.

Animations - XAML-Based Animations

Defining storyboards and animations in XAML is ostensibly easier than defining them in code, and for that reason you’ll find the vast majority of Silverlight storyboards and animations in XAML.

Animations - Some Variations

The advantage of using strings for property names is that you can stack property names in a pile. This allows you to animate a property of an object without referencing that object itself.

Animations : Click and Spin

Suppose you want to enhance a button to give some extra visual feedback to the user. You decide you actually want a lot of visual feedback to wake up a drowsy user, and therefore you choose to spin the button around in a circle every time it’s clicked.

Animations : Frame-Based vs. Time-Based

You can pace this animation either by the rate that video hardware refreshes the display, or by clock time. Because each refresh of the video display is called a frame, these two methods of pacing animation are referred to as frame-based and time-based.