To date I’ve avoided doing any serious development in Silverlight. Every time I’ve tried to tackle it I get so frustrated with all the missing pieces. Besides which I’ve never had a good reason to do any Silverlight work – I’ve never been a fan of applications that run in a browser.

With the release of the Windows Phone Series development tools however, I now have a good reason. So I figured I’d pick a relative simple, small scale WPF application that actually makes some sense to run on a mobile device. Rather than starting it from scratch I just wanted to port it from WPF – so I chose the Word Puzzle program that I wrote a couple of years back. I figured it was a good choice because it met the criteria above, plus I’d already stripped it back a little to make sure it could run as an XBAP application.

Inspired by Rob’s posts on porting NProf to Silverlight I thought it may be of some interest to list off the issues that I come up against as I go through the process of porting. This first list represents me starting a new Windows Phone project and copying over classes and XAML files to get something to compile and look recognizable. The following represents about 2 hours work:

However, along the way I came across this list of issues:

• No Viewbox
• No MouseDown or MouseUp
• No UniformGrid
• No Image.StretchDirection
• x:Type is not supported
• No Style.Triggers
• No DockPanel
• No RoutedCommand
• No KeyGesture
• No DataType on DataTemplate?
• No ValueConversion
• No DefiningGeometry on Shape
• No BooleanToVisibilityConverter
• No DynamicResource
• No WrapPanel

I haven’t verified the above list yet – save that they gave me compilation errors. I easily found a replacement UniformGrid, but there are a few items on the list that may pose more of a problem.

The next step is to get some level of interaction working.