WP7 Perf Tip #3: Read the performance document
This is kind of obvious - but important. Read the White Paper which was written by the Silverlight performance team (mainly Shane Guillet) and browse through the samples that come with it. In these blog posts I'll try to distill specific items from the paper into blog format, but you can't replace the feel of the complete paper.
Additionally check out the performance video with Shane, which runs through a lot of the samples from the document and distills specific tips and tricks to get your app running smoothly: https://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Inside+Windows+Phone/Inside-Windows-Phone-03-Optimizing-Windows-Phone-Silverlight-applications/