Design and Layout - Windows Phone Development for People in a Hurry

Design

Some icons for the application bar are built into Blend, but there are also a great set of Creative Commons icons at Modern UI Icons
Design should focus on typography rather than chrome. Guideline minimum size for text is 13pt
Absolute minimum border around touch activated UI elements should be 7px to avoid tapping the wrong element
Data is sacred, if any action will cause data to be deleted/lost then prompt the user
Ultimately it is best to use a Windows Phone to get a feel for the design

Below is the page layout for an example app. Arrows show where navigation buttons in the pages point
Hub and Spoke is a design principle that limits where the navigation buttons in your UI should point to ensure a good user experience
Navigation occurs via a series of 'hubs', (e.g. Profiles, Orders) the primary hub being the home screen (e.g. Profiles)
The user drills down along a 'spoke' using buttons in the UI and returning back to the hub using the physical back button on the phone
Only allow navigation buttons in the UI to go deeper into the content, not back or across to another spoke (e.g. from Order Details to Add Order)
To get to another spoke, user should back out to the common hub and then drill down the other path
If you need to return as the result of a button press (e.g. saved a new profile), then activate the back button behaviour using,
```
if (NavigationService.CanGoBack) NavigationService.GoBack();
```

To navigate to another page, put the following in e.g. a button click event handler
```
NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/View/ProfilePage.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
```

To pass data between pages use HTML style queries in the URI e.g.

NavigationService.Navigate(
    new Uri(String.Format("/View/ProfilePage.xaml?Action={0}&Id={0}", action, id)));

To retrieve these queries, use,;

string action
NavigationContext.QueryString.TryGetValue("Action", out action);

To pass an object from one page to another either,
- Save to a ViewModel property
- If it is a database object with a unique id, send the id in the URI as above then retrieve the object via a Linq query on the new page