[Windows Phone] Delaying the Splash Screen

Say again? Why on earth will you want to delay the initialization of your app? Well, there are some cases in which your app needs to have some data ready from the start. No matter how many times we have been told to postpone heavy load of data after your app have been initialized, there are situations in which your landing page needs to be populated with data (coming from different sources) without glitches and delays. So, if you want a couple of extra seconds to load your data, keep reading.

[Windows Phone] Populating content smoothly

We, users of the Windows Phone OS, love its fluidity and how content is populated smoothly throughout the OS (take for example how album thumbnails are loaded in the Pictures Hub).

As developers, we don’t have any built-in mechanism to populate content this way, but we can fix that by using transitions, storyboards and behaviors. For this post, we will create two classes: OpacityTransition and OnLoadedOpacityBehavior.

[Windows Phone] Get the tilt effect and the click event, everywhere

When designing your Windows Phone application you may need the TextBlock, for instance, to receive a Click or Tap event. Also, to make your application shine, you also want the tilt effect when your user taps the control. A good example of this are the Panorama controls used throughout the Windows Phone OS, or third party applications such as Nokia Music.