WP7 Panorama: Smoothly fading the background (and enabling fading when changing, too)

I've heard a number of conversations with developers about wanting to smoothly fade in background image changes within the Panorama control that ships in the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools. I spent the better part of this rainy Seattle Sunday looking into this. I actually had a conversation with the famed Kelly Sommers (@kellabyte) a [...] ...