In the first parts of the series about developing the SilverlightShow Windows Phone app I explained the general development process and the technical details of accessing and optimizing the RSS feeds of the site. Now that we are able to access all of the content from the phone, the next step is to take a look at what was necessary to display what we have to the user while preserving a native look and feel. If you haven't seen the app in action, here is a short video about it.

When you recall the details of the previous part or simply take a quick look at the RSS feeds of the SilverlightShow site again (sample), you will see that the content of each category (news, articles, events) is stored as fully formatted HTML already. All of it is produced by authors in WYSIWYG tools like Windows Live Writer and directly uploaded to the site's content management system. Even though we receive a slightly optimized and cleaned version of that rich content on the phone, it's still HTML. The fundamental decision to make hence was whether we would take that content as-is or transform it into something more native to the phone platform.

You can read the full article at SilverlightShow here:

Creating the SilverlightShow Windows Phone App: part 3

Sometimes seemingly simple things are the most expensive to achieve. One such thing involves the Windows Phone WebBrowser control that allows you to show arbitrary web content embedded in your application.

The problem I ran into is that the control does not show any scrollbars when the content is larger than the visible area. This is a bit of a surprise, because the built-in browser of the phone does this nicely:

This means that your user has no indication of the total content length or the current scroll position when you show HTML content in your application, which is a bit unfortunate. In the following I talk about the various attempts and ideas I tried to fix this; if you're only interested in a possible work around, you can skip to the end of the post. More...