One thing I think is important is to give users a consistent look and feel for every page and every app on the Windows phone. I figured out how to do pretty page turns the same way native apps do them, and now I’m trying to figure out how to make all my ListBox items look the same way they do in native apps as well.
For example, when you are in the settings app and you click on an item, the item’s text shrinks a little bit while your finger is on it, and when you release the button, the text goes back to normal size and initiates a page navigation.
I can do page navigation. But I want my navigation buttons be exactly the same, not just kinda similar. As a matter of fact, I want my whole app to conform so uniformly to the rest of the OS that the users will think Microsoft built it. Is there a standard library, set of controls, or framework that Microsoft uses that we can have access to? Is there a blog or some other resource devoted to showing us how to mimic Microsoft UI design?
Whilst Silverlight for WP7 makes it easy to create applications that have the same static look as the native apps (email etc…), the Silverlight framework lacks much of the dynamic features, the transitions, animations and other effects. A while back I wrote a Metro In Motion blog series that shows how to mimic the fluid animations that are exhibited by the native applications …
Hopefully these will help you achieve the native look and feel you are after.