Book Image

Windows Application Development Cookbook

By : Marcin Jamro
Book Image

Windows Application Development Cookbook

By: Marcin Jamro

Overview of this book

Need to ensure you can always create the best Windows apps regardless of platform? What you need are solutions to the biggest issues you can face, so you can always ensure you’re making the right choices and creating the best apps you can. The book starts with recipes that will help you set up the integrated development environment before you go ahead and design the user interface. You will learn how to use the MVVM design pattern together with data binding, as well as how to work with data in different file formats. Moving on, you will explore techniques to add animations and graphics to your application, and enable your solution to work with multimedia content. You will also see how to use sensors, such as an accelerometer and a compass, as well as obtain the current GPS location. You will make your application ready to work with Internet-based scenarios, such as composing e-mails or downloading files, before finally testing the project and submitting it to the Windows Store. By the end of the book, you will have a market-ready application compatible across different Windows devices, including smartphones, tablets, and desktops.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Utilizing additional features of the emulator

The provided emulators are equipped with some additional features that simplify the testing of applications. In this recipe, you will learn how to use such features of the smartphone-based emulators available within the IDE.

Getting ready

To complete this recipe, you need an automatically generated project.

How to do it...

To utilize additional features provided by the emulator of a smartphone, you need to perform the following steps:

  1. Select Fit to Screen to automatically adjust the size of the emulator. You could specify zoom directly using the Zoom option.
  2. Use the Rotate Left and Rotate Right options to rotate the emulator, either counterclockwise or clockwise, respectively.
  3. Check various input modes by clicking on the small icons located on the right-hand side of the emulator, such as:
    • Single Point Mouse Input
    • Single Point Touch Input
    • Multi-touch Input

  4. Run the application in Mobile Emulator (...) WXGA 4.5 inch 1GB. Then, wait until the application is loaded.
  5. Click on the Tools option (double arrow) to open the window with the additional features available within the emulator, which are organized into tabs, such as:
    • Accelerometer: This is used to simulate data from the accelerometer sensor
    • Location: This is used to simulate the current GPS location
    • Screenshot: This is used to capture and save the screenshot from the emulator
    • Network : This is used to enable or disable the network for an emulator as well as to specify the network speed and signal strength
    • SD Card: This uses the local folder as an SD card within the phone
    • Checkpoints: This is used to manage the saving states of the emulator
    • Optional Settings: This is used to mark which hardware should be emulated
    • Notifications: This is used to simulate push notifications sent to the application
    • NFC: This is used to emulate NFC-based scenarios

How to do it...

See also

  • The Running the application recipe
  • The Creating a unit test and Running a set of tests recipes in Chapter 9, Testing and Submission