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)

Toast notifications


Toast notifications are often used to inform users about things that apply to our application. It could be information about messages, invitations, and so on. We are going to create a simple method that shows a sample message, and after clicking, it goes directly to one of the pages in the application.

public static void ShowSettingsToast()
{
  var toastMessage = new ShellToast();
  toastMessage.Title = "Hello";
  toastMessage.Content = "Your app settings needs your attention";
  toastMessage.NavigationUri = new Uri("/Views/SettingsPage.xaml", UriKind.Relative);
  toastMessage.Show();
}

Implementation is very simple; it's just an initialization of the ShellToast object that contains Title, Content, and NavigationUri and that points to our application page. Calling this method in background agent causes the notification to be seen when the application is not running.