In the last article, I talked about the specific requirements and recommendations regarding Windows Phone 7 iconography, including images for your application's tiles, the Marketplace, and application bar buttons. This time, I want to take it a step further and sum up all of the most important key points of the application certification requirements in the form of a cheat sheet.

The full requirements can be found online on MSDN. The following will provide you short summaries of the technical and submission requirements as well as the application policies. The order is not necessarily the same as in the original documentation, to structure the information a bit more for a developer's view. Please note that this is not a normal article. It is not intended to be read from top to bottom – instead it is meant as a reference for quick look-ups where you don't want to click through/search the complete requirements online. You can download a handy single-page PDF/XPS version at the end of the article which for example can be printed out and pinned to a wall in your working space, so you have everything at hand with a quick look.

The full article and the print version downloads of the cheat sheet can be found on Silverlight Show.

Every Windows Phone application has to deal with and provide a certain set of icons. The appearance and technical details of those icons are bound to specific certification requirements. Additional requirements exist for other optional places where you can use icons in your application. This article covers all of the icon guidelines and specifications relevant for a normal Windows Phone application, in particular:

• Tile icons [mandatory] – Contained in your application package and used for the application list and home screen.
• Marketplace icons [mandatory] – Required to represent your application in the Marketplace catalog.
• Application bar icons [optional] – Icons used for buttons in the application bar.

Once again you can read the full article on Silverlight Show.

Windows Phone 7 supports multiple screen orientations, and the built-in sensors allow the system to adjust the orientation automatically when the user rotates or tilts the device, without manual interaction. For developers, supporting these orientations and orientation changes seems pretty simple at first, but on closer inspection more and more issues need to be resolved and planned ahead.

You can read the full article at Silverlight Show.

Yesterday I stumbled upon a bewildering detail when I worked with Forms Authentication and Windows Phone 7 that cost me quite some time to fix and work around, so I decided to blog about it to save others from the same trouble.

The setup in particular was that I talked to a WCF RESTful service from Windows Phone 7, using the HttpWebRequest class. Part of this was doing the authentication, which used Forms Authentication. If you are familiar with the concept, then you know that this authentication uses cookies to store an authentication ticket (unless configured not to use cookies). The cookie is sent to the server with each request to identify an authenticated user. As it turns out, working with this concept on Windows Phone 7 is not really straight forward, partly due to restrictions of Silverlight, partly because of problems that are caused by the platform itself. More...