Windows Phone Development: Libraries

In previous post we were talking about windows phone developers communities and now we will tell you about some features in application developement.

First thing to deal with is designing of your applciation. If you take a look and windows phone you'll see a lot of animation in it's enternal design. Live tiles, page transitions, gestures, dragging controls and so on. So you may have a questions on how to do such things. One of the answer is to use controls which were designed by someone else. Hopefully there are some availiavle windows phone controls toolkits:

1. Official Siverlight toolkit Which has some extremelly neccessaty controls such as page transitions and tilt effect. AutoCompleteBox, DatePicker, TimePicker, WrapPanel, Toggle Buttons, LongListSelector and few other controls are also the part of the toolkit. If you will use phone apps such as Contacts, Settings, Matketplace even a Desktop you will see that all of them were made using silverlight toolkit.

2. Coding4Fun Toolkit including some nice own controls and good adjustments on silverlight toolkit. Also it includes text.Binding.UpdateSoutceOnChange helper for whose who will want to work with MVVM Pattern which is as good for windows phone as for standart wpf and silverlight.

Where are a lot of other toolkits which are availiavle for developers

3. Windows azure toolkit for working with cloud data.

4. Some toolkits for MVVM (model - view - viewmodel) pattern. Simple toolkit on codeplex or galasoft MVVM light toolkit.

5. Balder toolkit for working with 3D Models in windows phone

6.Sterling NoSQl OODB for .Net 4.0 availiable on windows phone too.

7. Windows Phone isolated storage explorer for easy working with isolated storage which is the analog of file system in windows phone

8. And the last but really making things faster project is Windows Phone Icon Maker which will help you to make all required for certification icons (4 icons with diffrent sizes. Two for marketplace on zune and phone and two for inside list and desktop icon) from a single image!

All in all these toolkits are needed in diffrent cases of development, but using them makes live much easier than trying resolving everything by yourself. In Our Applications we mostly use this toolkits, but we always try to discover others or made our own helpers and controls in particular unresolved situations.

In out next posts we will tell you about our already developed applications and try to provide you a video survey.