Windows Phone 7 support themes that allow you to configure the color background of Dark (black) or Light (white) and a Accent color. Currently the phone will only support four colors of Orange, Blue, Red, and Green. The user will be able to select their favorite color of the four and the phone will change the mood of the phone. Below is an example of an application before and after implementing the feature.

To set the color of a TextBlock is very easy. Here is the code.

Adding this feature to your application in specific areas will make your application feel more integrated with the Windows Phone 7 environment. The user experience goes up and the user will enjoy your application more therefore making both the user and you happy. Some may look at this at say this is just silly but user experience is very important and you should always be interesting in every little details of your application.

Here is my first Windows Phone 7 application! I really like to play a game called World of Warcraft. I figure it would be nice to create some applications for the Windows Phone that would be able to interact with the World of Warcraft universe. My first application will display the status of all the World of Warcraft realms (servers). Let’s step thought the different parts of the application.

The Realm Status Data

First thing we have to do is get the data that stores the realm status. This application will request the realm status from the World of Warcraft realm status page. The site is located on the realm status page. At first I thought I was going to have to parse the HTML page but after some investigation I found that the page simply displays an XML file. This is great news for parsing an XML file would be easy.

Getting the XML Data File

Getting the file should be very easy and it is. However it appears the communication model of the Windows Phone 7 is leaning toward a more asynchronous model. This means it will not be as simple as just saying give me the file and I’ll wait here until you get it. We will have to request the file and we will be alerted when the file arrives. I created a FileDownloader class to assist with getting the data file. Here is the code. More...