I posted about neat looking gallery using the Metro UI and developed in Silverlight by Microsoft nearly 2 weeks ago and wondered how long it would take to port it to Windows Phone 7 now that the mobile OS fully supports SL and DeepZoom. Well, Ronnie Saurenmann, from Microsoft Switzerland, was kind enough to mail me out of the blue today and tell me that he successfully ported his gallery to Windows Phone 7 in 1 hour and a half! According to him the port actually took only 30 minutes but he had to ad the app bar, back navigation function and some performance tweaks (the app is faster/smoother than in the video) so the total time spent on it was finally around 1 hour and a half (90% of the code is shared between both versions). I think that this really speaks volume on how Microsoft has really a leg up the competition when it comes to application development now that they are finally integrating all their latest technology and services into one powerful package. You can check out the original desktop application here. Below is a video of the WP7 version on the CTP emulator:

Microsoft did a really nice Silverlight gallery of the Van Gogh, Cézanne, Monet collection presented at the Kunsthaus Zürich in Switzerland. The presentation uses DeepZoom and the Metro UI to navigate trough the paintings. It would be interesting to see if this interactive gallery can be easily ported to WP7 now that DeepZoom is fully functional on Windows Phone 7. Head over here to check it out.