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)

The File API


As we said before, isolated storage could contain files and folders. The new Windows Phone 8 SDK provides asynchronous methods to manage files in our storage.

  • RenameAsync: This renames the selected folder

  • DeleteAsync: This deletes the folder in which the method was called

  • CreateFolderAsync: This creates a folder with a specified name and default behavior in case of conflicts

  • CreateFileAsync: This creates a file in the folder with a name and default behavior in case of conflict

  • OpenStreamForReadAsync: This opens the file stream to read

  • OpenStreamForWriteAsync: This opens the file stream to write

The following examples will show how to read/write the simplest message—a string type variable.

Reading the file

The following example will present ReadTextFile() asynchronously:

public async Task<string> ReadTextFile()
{
  string result = string.Empty;
  StorageFolder storage = ApplicationData.Current.LocalFolder;
  
  if (storage != null)
  {
    var dataFolder = await storage.GetFolderAsync...