This article will show the details of implementing augmented reality in Windows Phone using Geo Augmented Reality Toolkit (GART). GART enables you to create augmented reality experiences that depend on real geographical locations. It takes care of overlaying Bing maps, your heading, picture/frames from camera and virtual elements that display information about certain points of interest.
This year, it was my first time ever to experience what it means to speak at a conference. I had a session at the Microsoft WinDays technology conference in Croatia, and I talked about Windows Phone multimedia and sensors. It was (and still is) an interesting combination of two topics that have much in common. Therefor it made sense to cover those in one session, which ended with augmented reality and a demo of a small augmented reality app (it was actually a video, because it’s difficult to demo augmented reality during the session because it’s necessary to move around). I will write more about multimedia and sensors in my next few blog posts, but for now I’ll just show you the video and how I created the app using Geo Augmented Reality Toolkit.
Motion API is a great way for you as a developer to get access to sensor data in more sophisticated and more useful way than just getting the raw data from each sensor. There’s a complex math in the background that combines the sensor data for you to get more usable data. This way, you can use Motion API to do interesting things such as rotate 3D objects in space using XNA Framework and Windows Phone. Read more…
I am a big fan (and user!) of open source components for the Windows Phone platform development. There are many (hundreds?) of them available on CodePlex, but I use some of them in almost every project I create. Why? Simply because it means that I can do more in less time. I can create better experiences, better design, better functionality. And so could you. You probably know about some of these, or perhaps even all, but they are so good that they’re worth mentioning to every Windows Phone developer. I even created a small presentation about Windows Phone and open source for purposes other than this blog article, but they deserve to be shared. :)
When you use Bing Maps and place pushpins on it, you have two basic options. One is to fetch all the pushpins (actually, locations) from some service and then programmatically add them to the map, or you can bind all the pins (locations) through MapItemsControl with ObservableCollection. In this article, I’ll show you how to add pins from the background worker in case you’re fetching a lot of them at the same time and you’re using data binding, and also how to create a smooth animation to make the pins fade-in as they become available. 
The interesting problem in Windows Phone development is how to make your png images visible on both black and white background (theme) that the users could be using. It’s important to have both scenarios covered to be sure that you’ll pass the certification! There are several solutions to this problem, and in this short article I’ll show you 2 ways.
Usually when you try to open a large photo on Windows Phone, it gets resized to a smaller one. What is a “large”, and what is a “smaller” photo? At the moment of writing this article, every photo larger than 2000 x 2000 pixels is considered large and gets resized to smaller version (longer side is then 2000 pixels), which can be a problem if you’re writing a photo editing software. I solved this problem in my free photo editing app called Photo Light, and in this article I’ll show you how to do it in your app. Have in mind that if you use images that are larger than 2000 x 2000 pixels, they will be significantly slower to appear and the memory consumption can become a problem!
