The Windows Phone Application Bar and System Tray

Posted on March 21, 2010 by admin

The Windows Phone interface has two primary components – the System Tray and the Application Bar.

Application Bar – Area at the bottom of the interface which provides a access to the most common tasks.  For tasks which are less common, applications can add a single menu which is launched from the application bar. he application bar can be hidden, in which case the application content will be visible to the bottom edge of the display. If the application bar is visible, then the behavior will depend on the screen mode:

  • Full-screen mode: The application bar blocks the content of the application and the height of the frame remains unchanged. A transparency effect can be used to inform the user that the Application Bar is on top of page content.
  • Non-full-screen mode: The content is reduced to enable the application bar to appear below the content and the height of the frame is reduced.

System Tray – Area at the top of the interface which  displays system-level status information. The user can interact with the system tray as it can update to provide notifications. The system tray is visible in non-full-screen mode and invisible in full screen mode. Unlike the Application Bar the System Tray cannot be toggled independent of the full-screen mode. In order to hide the system tray and show the application bar, full-screen mode should be used and the obscured portion of the screen will need to be manually handled.

Posted in Silverlight | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Windows Phone Silverlight Controls

Posted on March 20, 2010 by admin

The following Silverlight controls are available for Windows Phone development:

  • ?Border
  • Button
  • Canvas
  • CheckBox
  • ContentControl
  • ContentPresenter
  • Control
  • Grid
  • HyperlinkButton
  • Image
  • InkPresenter
  • ListBox
  • MediaElement
  • MultiScaleImage
  • Panel
  • PasswordBox
  • ProgressBar
  • RadioButton
  • ScrollViewer
  • Slider
  • StackPanel
  • TextBlock
  • TextBox
  • UserControl

One important issue to note is that the ListBox control will in future be replaced by the ListView control in future updates to the development environment.

Posted in Silverlight | Leave a comment

Windows Phone Back Button

Posted on March 20, 2010 by admin

The back button is a key feature differentiating Windows Phone from the iPhone and Android.The hardware back button is mandatory on all Windows Phones and will likely be a key navigation feature in Windows Phone applications.

The back button is used to navigate back within an application. Normally developers do not have to worry about implementing this function as, by default, the framework performs this operation. However developers can  write custom code to perform the back operation. One such example is a context menu. A context menu is simply a pop-up menu that overlays an active page. To do this the BackKeyPress event has to be handled on the OnBackKeyPress method.

Posted in News | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Windows Phone Frame and Page Navigation

Posted on March 20, 2010 by admin

Windows phone apps are based on the Silverlight page model where users can navigate forward through content screens . Using the hardware back button, users can easily navigate backwards.

The core elements of the page UI are a top-level container control named PhoneApplicationFrame which can host a PhoneApplicationPage. These are analogous to the standard  Frame and Page types, although you are required to use only the PhoneApplicationFrame and PhoneApplicationPage types in Windows Phone applications.
The PhoneApplicationFrame control holds contains the page control and other elements such as the system tray and application bar. The PhoneApplicationPage control holds the section of content for the application. There is only one frame allowed per Windows Phone application, but there are typicallyseveral pages of content which can be navigated to using the frame.

Posted in Silverlight | Tagged | Leave a comment

First Look at Silverlight for Windows Phone

Posted on March 20, 2010 by admin

Silverlight will be the primary development technology for Windows Phone. Initially, only a subset of Silverlight 3 features plus the new features of Silverlight 4 will be will available. The supported features of Silverlight 3 will be:

  • Input
  • UI rendering
  • Media
  • Deep Zoom
  • Controls
  • Layout
  • Data binding
  • Isolated storage
  • Networking (HttpWebRequest, WebClient)
  • XAML
  • XAP packaging
  • XML serialization
  • Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

In addition, there are several new Silverlight features which are unique to Windows Phone, namely

  • Gesture controls
  • Software input panel (SIP) support on the TextBox control
  • Manipulation events
  • Windows Phone Class Library (this is a library of classes specific to working with the Windows Phone UI)
Posted in Silverlight | Tagged | Leave a comment

First Look at Windows Phone Marketplace [News]

Posted on March 20, 2010 by admin

The Windows Phone Marketplace was demoed for the first time at Mix 2010. The Marketplace is of great interest to developers as Apple’s App Store has proved a great distribution model for small application developers. However the App Store has shown signs of a growing pains of late and the Windows Phone Marketplace looks to address those weaknesses, specifically discoverability. Developers have complained that it is almost impossible to get an app noticed in the App Store amongst 100,000 other apps.

To help with discoverability, the Marketplace provides a most visual experience with larger and higher resolution images of the app instead of smaller tiles on the App Store. In addition, the Marketplace has a recommendation engine which suggests suitable apps based on previous apps the suer has installed.
Application search is also more powerful than the App Store and crucially rankings are done by both quantity of downloads and ratings, instead of just recent downloads as on the App store.

Monetization

A key innovation in the Windows Phone Marketplace is the trial app system, where a user can download an app and receive a time limited free trial which will then expire and the user will be prompted to upgrade to a paid app. This contrasts with the Apple App Store where the model is a relatively clunky with users being able to download a free app and then download a separate paid app if they want additional features.

In addition billing can be done through the mobile carriers (ie users will pay via their phone bill).

Connecting With Users

Application vendors are better able to connect with users via live notifications – vendors can easily push messages  to the app. Updates are meant to be more visible and users can download and install multiple updates at once.

Posted in News | Tagged | Leave a comment

First Look at the Windows Phone Developer Tools [News]

Posted on March 20, 2010 by admin

At Mix 2010 Microsoft unveiled the first CTP’s of the tools developers can use to build Windows Phone apps. The Windows Phone Developer toolkit can be downloaded here .

The developer tools CTP is a single install which contains the below tools:

  • Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP
  • Windows Phone Emulator CTP
  • Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP
  • XNA 4.0 Game Studio CTP

Please note that you will need the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2010 for the Windows Phone Express snap-in to work (beta 2 and below are not compatible).

Posted in News | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Windows Phone XNA

Posted on February 22, 2010 by admin

In leaked documents, Microsoft has outline the development platform for the Windows Phone OS and the key development environment for Win Phone games will be XNA.

XNA is the development environment for both XBox LIVE and the ZuneHD. This appears to confirm that the XBox LIVE games will be ported to the Win Phone platform  and suggests that ZuneHD, XBox LIVE and Windows Phone will all be compatible. XNA support guarantees that there will be  a wide selection of high quality games available at launch of WinPhone.

Posted in News | Tagged | Leave a comment

Windows Phone Application Platform

Posted on February 22, 2010 by admin

Althought not meant to be officially released until Mix 2010, details of the Windows Phone Application Platform have already been leaked.

Application Platform Components

The core components of the application platform will be Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend. The Windows phone emulator is a Visual Studio addin which will enable VS to emulate the Win Phone on the local PC.

There are two frameworks available for development on the Windows Phone OS:

  1. Silverlight
  2. XNA for development of games (this is the same language used to develop ZuneHD games and XBOX LIVE games).

The document also confirmed that the forthcoming Win Phone will have cloud access so there is likely to be an API for connecting to Windows Azure Storage as well as Windows Live.

As with Silverlight, apps will run in a sandbox and Microsoft highlighted that there will be two levels of API’s – a native API  which developers will have restricted access to and a more basic set of API’s that will be available for all applicatons.

Posted in News | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Windows Phone 7 – SQL Server

Posted on February 17, 2010 by admin

At MWC Microsoft demoed Windows Phone 7  but developer details were sparse – one key question is what will be the database service. SQL Server CE was the provider for Windows Mobile 6x but Microsoft promised to make an announcement on the Win Phone 7 SQL Server details at Mix in March 2010.

Posted in News | Tagged , | Leave a comment