I worked for more than a month as a TTL of a team to develop a Surface application; as a feedback, I liked the table and the SDK rather complete (though it lacks a control map!) and really working simulator that prevents many people to deploy on it each time to test if everything works

I learned more things about WPF, in particular templating, binding and animations, even if as a ”code” developer I didn’t want to open Blend … (And I was close to succeed )

As summer months are a little more peaceful, I’ll try to summarize some points that I felt important to remind as “tips & tricks” list, stay tuned!

Under development of a Surface project for a client, I have been facing a problem that many of those who have developed on this device should have faced: using, as in the Microsoft Concierge, the control Map (aka Virtual Earth map).

As stated on the Microsoft MSDN forum, the only use of control which is supported is the Ajax SDK, which sounds not very useful when doing WPF…

Fortunately, a real nice guy, through its company, has made a fairly complete control wrapper through WPF, as you see a brief video presentation I made some time ago.

Thus, we are able to use any of WPF templating for Pushpins on the map, zoom control actions, or geographical positions of the globe … Enough to play on this for quite a while :)