I’ve been looking for a way to create custom transitions for the Apps I’m writing for Windows Phone 7 and came across this informative post and video. Where they describe how to create custom transitions for per page navigation. The only issue is it hasn’t been updated for the Beta release. So I took 10 mins (with the help of ReSharper) to upgrade it to the new Beta, so others don't have to go through the work. I’m not sure if its my machine, but the transitions in the emulator looked a bit sluggish, however I tried them out on a device and they seemed smooth.

FindAZip-CustomTransitions-Beta.zip

Its been awhile since I put up a blog post and that’s partly due to being so busy working on my two Windows Phone 7 Apps. Which brings me to the topic of this post and one which I think is important for fellow devs to understand. I am one of the lucky few that have received a real device and its very nice! :)  (thanks Microsoft!)

One of the first things I started to do was performance test my App on the device and found that the device is a lot slower than the emulator. So I started to run some optimizations and wrote a small benchmark App to help me work out which refactorings were the fastest. I was rather pleased with myself when I ended up getting improvements of 200 and 300%! in the emulator. Then thought I’d see how much of that new gain transferred to the device. The results shocked the hell out me, as rather than getting a gain I ended up with a lost of 50%! That’s right my optimizations did the exact opposite of what they were supposed to do.More...