Chapter 11. Building Windows Phone UI with Silverlight controls
This chapter covers
- Using theme-aware controls
- Specifying keyboard layouts
- Using render transforms
- Working with the Silverlight Toolkit
Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 provides several user interface controls to application developers. Though most of the controls exist in Silverlight for the browser and other user interface libraries, this chapter addresses features of the controls that are relevant to building user interfaces for the Windows Phone. We discuss which controls to use to prompt the user for input, which controls to use to display output to the user, and techniques to combine or to modify controls in order to create new user experiences. You’ll also learn how to ensure the controls you use integrate with the user-specified system theme.
In addition to the controls shipped as part of the Windows Phone SDK, we’ll look at a few of the controls that are available in the Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone. The Silverlight Toolkit is an open source project hosted on CodePlex. Microsoft uses the Silverlight Toolkit project to share new controls and components with the development community.
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the controls, we show you how to build an application that uses different screen layouts when the user turns the phone from portrait to landscape orientation. The orientation sample application uses Silverlight’s VisualStateManager to animate transitions from portrait to landscape.