Windows Phone 7 Design Guidelines – Cheat Sheet

One of the tasks I am trying to accomplish as I write the documentation to accompany the FuelTracker project, is to incorporate the design guidelines and certification requirements where they are pertinent. As a side effect of this effort, I’ve generated this little “cheat sheet” of various design hints and app requirements gleaned from these documents. Most of these hints pertain to issues we ran into when implementing Fuel Tracker so it assumes some basic familiarity with Silverlight controls and other features that are covered in detail in the design guidelines. I expect to be adding to this list, but  I am posting what I have so far, as I think it has some value.

Navigation, frames and pages

• Mockup the pages and navigational map of your application and walk through them several times before coding. This will minimize or eliminate the need to add pages or change the map later, when it will be much harder.
• Make sure to consider the back button and user interactions with the application bar when creating your navigation map.

Application Bar

• Use the application bar button for common application tasks.
• You are limited to four application bar buttons.
• Place less frequently performed actions in the application bar menu.
• If the action is difficult to clearly convey with an icon, place it in the application bar menu instead of as a button.
• You are limited to five application bar menu items to prevent scrolling.
• Standard application bar icons are installed as part of the Windows Phone Developer tools. Find them at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Icons
• Custom application bar icons should be 48 x 48 pixels and use a white foreground on a transparent background. You do not need the circle in the icon, as this is drawn by the application bar.

Back button

Read more: Silverlight SDK

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