Book Image

Windows Phone 7.5 Application Development with F#

By : Lohith G N
Book Image

Windows Phone 7.5 Application Development with F#

By: Lohith G N

Overview of this book

Windows Phone is an OS which is also a platform in itself and provides an opportunity for application developers to build their apps and sell them on the Windows Phone Marketplace. Windows Phone is slowly catching up in the race with iOS and Android. Although well suited for scientific and mathematical calculations, the Windows Phone Platform provides an opportunity to program in F#. "Windows Phone 7.5 Application Development with F#"  focuses on making the user aware of Windows Phone App Development with the F# programming language in as short a time as possible. The book teaches you about the development environment, helps you understand the project structure, understand the controls, and ends with some of the cool features of the platform like sensors, launchers, and choosers. The book starts off with enabling the user with the right tools required to start developing. It focuses on getting the IDE ready, and project and item templates. By the end of the book the user will be familiarized with the different aspects of the platform itself. The transition from one chapter to another is short and focused so that you can get to the meat of the topic quickly.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Windows Phone 7.5 Application Development with F#
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
4
Windows Phone Screen Orientations
5
Windows Phone Gesture Events
7
Windows Phone and Data Access
Index

Overview of Launchers and Choosers


Launchers and Choosers enable the Windows Phone applications to access the built-in applications and data stores on the device. For example, if we want to make a phone call from within our application, we would use what we call a Launcher; or if we want to access the data libraries on the device, such as the photo library, we would use what we call a Chooser.

The main difference between a Launcher and a Chooser is that Launchers don't return any value, whereas Choosers return a value. For example, we have a Launcher known as EmailComposerTask that starts the e-mail application and when it exits, the control is returned to the application that called it. We also have a Chooser called CameraCaptureTask that starts the camera application. After the user takes a picture, the camera application exits and returns the value of the photo that was taken.

When we call a Launcher or a Chooser, our Windows Phone application goes to the background, and the built-in application...