I just posted an article on how to simulate 3D buttons on a Windows Phone Silverlight application.

The Madison .NET User Group was very fortunate to have Al Pascual speak last night on Silverlight and GIS.  He had good demos and provided links to resources online that you should go check out.  Here is a link to his powerpoint presentation.

He currently works at ESRI and is working with mapping technologies and Silverlight.  Check out his blog and the presentation.

I posted an article on making a Panoramic Silverlight Application on the Windows Phone using Visual Studio 2010.   It's a simple example on how to build the app and navigate between screens using touch flicks.

I just posted an article on how to capture an image on the Windows Phone emulator using an Internet camera.  This was written using the Windows Phone Dev Tools April Refresh.  For all those developers who want to capture images on the Windows Phone but can't get access to the camera, this is a nice alternative so you can write apps that capture and manipulate images on the emulator.  Eventually Microsoft is sure to release an emulator that will access the camera hardware but until then try this out.

In a week of cancelled projects, Microsoft has cancelled the Courier tablet device.  The Courier device was an innovative folding, dual screen tablet device that was getting a lot of attention in the developer world.  A Microsoft team had developed a compelling tablet prototype but the company execs decided that they weren't going to bring the device into production at this time.  Microsoft spends a lot of money on research projects and prototypes to explore new possible interfaces and devices.  It's too bad we won't be seeing this device out in the wild.

It looks like HP has killed the Windows 7 slate tablet they've been working on.  The expectations were that a Windows 7 slate from HP was going to head to head with the Apple iPad.  Now it looks as though HP will be going back to the drawing board and using their newly acquired WebOS from Palm.  Obviously this will lower the overall cost of the device because HP will not have to pay licensing fees for Windows 7 and Microsoft apps.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the market.

HP has reached an agreement to buy Palm for $1.2 billion.  This should be interesting to see what products come out of this.  Speculations are that HP might use WebOS as an option for their new slate tablets due this year.

I got an official response from someone at Microsoft.  The Touch.FrameReported event WILL be available in the final release of Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.  It just didn't make it into the current technology preview.  I was also told that it did not make it into the next release of the CTP but it will be in the following one.  For those of us that are working on multi-touch apps, this will be great to have.  Windows Phone 7 is going to be fun.

I also wanted to say how impressed I am with Microsoft's response to my questions.  I sent an email to ScottGu on Sunday afternoon asking about Touch.FrameReported event.  Within an hour, he forwarded my email to the people who knew the answer and they responded in less than an hour.  It was fantastic response time on a Sunday afternoon.  I continue to be very impressed.  Keep up the good work. 

For those of us who have one of the HP tx2 tablets, we can already develop multi-touch apps for the Windows Phone 7 because the emulator supports multiple touch points.  However, I'm currently not able to get the Touch.FrameReported event to fire in a Silverlight app on the Windows Phone 7 emulator.  I'm hoping that it's just because this is the first rev of the emulator.  There are very few postings online that even talk about it.  I'm going to contact someone from Microsoft to get an official response on the subject.  I'll post the results as soon as I know more.

Check out the concept device from Microsoft Research and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs called the LucidTouch.  It is a prototype device that let's the user interact with screen content from the BACK of the device.  You can see your fingers through a 'pseudo-translucency' on the screen.  The idea is that your hand and fingers won't obscure images on the screen.