In this Issue: Michael Washington, Samuel Jack, Alfred Astort(-2-), Nokola(-2-), Avi Pilosof, Chris Klug, Pete Brown, Laurent Bugnion(-2-), and Jaime Rodriguez(-2-, -3-).

Above the Fold:

Shoutouts:

Koen Zwikstra announced the availability of the first Silverlight Spy 4 Preview 1

Gavin Wignall announced the Launch of Festive game built with Silverlight 4, hosted on Azure ... free to play.

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act

Michael Washington has an interesting take on writing a blog post with this 'play' version of Silverlight View Models and Expression Blend with a heaping dose of Behaviors added in for flavoring.

Build a Windows Phone Game in 3 days – Day 1

Samuel Jack is attempting to build a WP7 game in 3 days including downloading the tools and an XNA book... interesting to see where he's headed wth this venture.

4 of 10 - Make sure your finger can hit the target and text is legible

Continuing with a series of tips from the folks reviewing apps for the marketplace via Alfred Astort is this number 4 -- touch target size and legible text.

5 of 10 - Give feedback on touch and progress within your UI

Alfred Astort's number 5 is also up, and continues the touch discussion with this tip about giving the user feedback on their touch.

Fantasia Painter Released for Windows Phone 7 + Tips

Nokola took the release of his Fantasia Painter on WP& as an opportunity not only to blog about the fact that we can go buy it, but has a blog full of hints and tips that he gathered while working on it.

Games for Windows Phone 7 Resources: Reducing Load Times, RPG Kit; Other

Nokola also blogged about the release of the new games education pack, and gives up the cursor he uses in his videos after being asked...

The simplest way to do design-time ViewModels with MVVM and Blend.

Avi Pilosof attacks the design-time ViewModel issue in Blend with a 'no code' solution.

Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight

Chris Klug is talking about sharing resources and styles across a large Silverlight project... near and dear to my heart at this moment.

Dynamically Generating Controls in WPF and Silverlight

Pete Brown has a post up that's generated some interest... creating controls at runtime... and he's demonstrating several different ways for both Silverlight and WPF

#twitter for Windows Phone 7 protips (#wp7)

Laurent Bugnion was posting these great tips for Twitter for WP7 and rolled all 16 of them up into a blog post... check them and the app out...

Increasing touch surface (#wp7dev)

Laurent Bugnion's most current post should be of great interest to WP7 devs... providing more touch surface for your user's fat fingers, err, I mean their fat fingerings :) ... great information and samples ... and interesting it is a fail point as listed by Alfred Astort above.

Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter

This material from Jaime Rodriguez actually hit prior to his Firestarter presentation, but should be required reading for anyone doing a WP7 app... great Performance tips from the trenches... slide deck, cheat-sheet, and code.

UpdateSourceTrigger on Windows Phone data bindings

Another post from Jaime Rodriguez actually went through a couple revisions already.. how about a WP7 TextBox that fires notifications to the ViewModel when the text changes? ... would you like a behavior with that?

Details on the Push Notification app limits

Jaime Rodriguez has yet another required reading post up on Push Notification limits ... what it really entails and how you can be a good WP7 citizen by the way you program your app.

Stay in the 'Light!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10