Update 2011-09-30: This article is compatible with the final version of Windows Phone 7.1 "Mango".

One of the exciting new features of the Mango update for Windows Phone 7 is the possibility to mix XNA and Silverlight content in the same application, which is an extremely useful and effective feature to both enrich your Silverlight applications with advanced graphics as well as building fancy UI experiences for your XNA-based games. In this screencast I'm walking you through a sample application and explain all the important involved code required to achieve this integration of XNA and Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 "Mango". More...

An often discussed topic on Windows Phone 7 is that of "tombstoning", which describes the process of your application being suspended and removed from the running processes (think hibernate) to free resources on the phone. The application can be "revived" later when the user navigates back to it. It's the developer's responsibility to create a user experience that gives the appearance of a seamless transition between applications even when tombstoning happens. For games, the basic concept is the same as for other applications; however, the implementation is done in a slightly different way. In this article, we learn about the differences between conventional Silverlight applications and games developed in XNA with regards to this concept. As always, you can read it over at Silverlight Show.

Update 2011-09-30: This article is compatible with the final version of Windows Phone 7.1 "Mango".

The next version of Windows Phone 7 will introduce a set of new tasks that allow your applications to launch and use additional built-in features of the phone. One of these tasks is the BingMapsDirectionsTask. Unlike the task we've looked at in the previous post that allows you to center the map on a specific location, this one supports a start and end location to display turn-by-turn driving directions. More...

Update 2011-09-30: This article is compatible with the final version of Windows Phone 7.1 "Mango".

The next version of Windows Phone 7 will introduce a set of new tasks that allow your applications to launch and use additional built-in features of the phone. One of these tasks is the BingMapsTask which some of you may remember (it was removed from the SDK in a CTP release a year ago). That task launches the Bing Maps application either at the user's current or an optional specific location. Additionally, you can provide a search term to tag matching locations on the map. Here is how the task is used. More...

Update 2011-09-30: This article is compatible with the final version of Windows Phone 7.1 "Mango".

Socket support is one of the exciting features that will be introduced with the next release of Windows Phone 7. For example, it should enable game developers to create better multiplayer experiences and add the possibility to bring a whole new class of applications to the phone (think chat/IM clients that rely on custom connections and protocols). In this post we'll see how sockets are used on the phone. More...