Last week we released the Silverlight Control Panel Starter Kit. This week, I’m following up with a Windows Phone 7 version. Just as with the last release, this proof of concept is intended as a starter kit for our customers. We welcome you to use it as a starting point to build your own Windows Phone 7 control panel. We also hope you can provide us with some feedback.

The first thing you are going to need is the Developer Tools. Most of you will be running this inside of a VM as I elected to do. While this is great as it doesn’t alter anything in your desktop environment, you may experience slowness and application sluggishness. This is a result of running the emulator within the VM, as the emulator itself is a VM. In the office we are calling this the “Inception effect,” as running a VM within a VM can lead to instability.

Outside of delays and slow response, you might have to try to launch the application a few different times from within the emulator itself. But once it’s running, it has been fairly stable.

I also recommend that you hard code your API key and database name into the application. The best place to do this would be in the mainpage.xaml. Simply replace the default text of the textbox to your own values.

The lines I am referring to are:

<TextBox x:Name="TbApiKey" TextWrapping="Wrap" Margin="0,31,0,0" d:LayoutOverrides="Height" FontSize="10.667" Text="HARD CODE YOUR API HERE FOR SIMPLICITY" FontWeight="Bold"/>

AND

<TextBox x:Name="TbSqlDb" TextWrapping="Wrap" Margin="0,31,0,0" d:LayoutOverrides="Height" FontSize="21.333" Text="HARD CODE DATABASE NAME HERE"/>

The complete project folder is available here.

– Michael Ossou