Book Image

Windows Phone 8 Application Development Essentials

By : Tomasz Szostak
Book Image

Windows Phone 8 Application Development Essentials

By: Tomasz Szostak

Overview of this book

<p>Windows Phone 8 replaces Windows Phone 7 devices with the Windows NT kernel found on many Windows 8 components. Windows 8 will give you more options to develop better and more visually appealing PC and Tablet applications.</p> <p>A practical guide that will show you how you how to create testable MVVM applications keeping in mind the best UI practices. You will learn how to integrate peripheral sensors and social portals like Facebook and Twitter into your applications. This book shows the advantages of using modern patterns instead of the traditional way of programming.</p> <p>Starting with a Windows Phone UI description, the guide then takes you through the world of fast and fluid design guidelines. After that, you will be shown the beauty of C# and MVVM advantages, finishing with clear descriptions of mobile-application integration with peripherals and social media. Clear and well-described examples throughout will help you become a WP8 developer.</p> <p>You will also learn how to test your applications using Unit Test cut dependencies in your methods using Mocks, and use the newest features of C# such as asynchronous methods. If you are more of a designer than a developer, then there is also an explanation on how to create a consistent look and feel for Windows Phone applications.</p>
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Implementing tile notification


Live tiles were designed to improve user response to our application; users feel that our application thinks about them all the time because it updates its tile and shows some information. The clue is to make users feel integrated with the application even if it is not running.

Updating the application tile from code

As we know, we have several tile sizes and templates. Each tile size could present some information to the user. Depending on the tile template that we want to use, we can update the data. If our application is pinned to the Start screen, we can get the active tile for the application using the ShellTile API. Using the following line we get the default tile for the application:

var activeTile = ShellTile.ActiveTiles.FirstOrDefault();

This value is not null when the application is pinned to the Start screen and we have to check that we do not face the exception. The activeTile object has the Update method, which gets TileData. TileData will update our...