Creating Animated Splash screen in Windows Phone 7

Creating a beautiful splash screen is always great to see for any application. Windows Phone 7 being no exception to it, you want to give the user great look and feel while loading the application using your Splash Screens. In this article, I am going to spend some time by talking about some of the probable options that you have to create your own Splash Screen for your windows phone 7 application.

What is Splash Screen?

Splash screen is the first screen that comes as an introduction to the application before the application gets on executing. During the application loads up into memory there are lot of things happen in background. The process is created in memory, memory blocks are allocated, Virtualized File System gets initialized etc. During these phase of loading the application, the application hung up and the user sees the black screen. If this wait becomes too long, the user gets frustrated and might stop using the application as well. The Mobile Marketplace also puts a threshold of 10 seconds in which your application must load, otherwise your application will be rejected from App Store. During this phase, if you show some nice little splash screen to the user without hampering the normal loading of the application, the user will feel much more comfortable with your application.

In this post I will demonstrate how you can create / use splash screen for your windows Phone 7 application and the different approaches available to you for this.

Basically there are two options available before you which will allow you to show your customized splash screen :

How to Customize On-Screen Keyboard Layout in Windows Phone 7 application ?

While you want to enter some text in your Windows Phone 7 application, the first thing that you will notice is your very own on – screen keyboard. As Windows Phone 7 mobile have a very large screen area, most of the phones does not have an analog keyboard associated with it. Hence your application should provide provision to handle keyboard events directly using on-screen keyboards. There are few flexibilities available to you while you define your input scope, in this post I will demonstrate them with an example.

What is InputScope?

InputScope is a special functionality to the developers to customize how the layout of the keyboard appear to the user while entering data into that particular textbox. Hence you can easily customize the On-Screen Keyboard for your input so that one can easily feed in data fast and easy. For instance, say if you want to take phone number as input,you need only digits and some special characters to be available, on the other hand, email needed alphanumeric characters with @ as symbol. Silverlight introduces the new option to let you specify the InputScope for a particular input. Lets look into the code below :

Async support for Silverlight and WP7

Async support in C# language brings the new life to the modern application development to bring forth the same technique of writing your code and bring asynchrony easily. The main focus of async ctp is to ornament the language in such a way so that the developer could seamlessly create applications that brings asynchrony yet not dealing with its complexity. Hence using the new technique, asynchrony could easily achieved in a program without refactoring the whole program with lots of callbacks and method calls. I have already talked about it in a separate article. If you don’t know, please visit “Async CTP 5.0”.


Async CTP is released again recently and announced in MIX 11. Just after it is released, the first thing that everyone looks for is what is new in the release. As a matter of fact, I did jumped back to see them but eventually found out that there is nothing new in this build in terms of new features is concerned but the release focuses on fixes of performance adding debugging capabilities etc. I will definitely look back to them later in another post, but in this post I am going to talk about another important thing that featured with this release. As opposed to the previous release, the current release now supports Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 environments. This seems to be interesting.

What is Asynchrony?

The word asynchrony means something that is running without blocking other operations running in parallel. If you have created a background Thread to process some data, you are actually doing asynchronous job in background as your foreground operation does not get hampered. In vNext C# introduces Asynchrony using TPL. The two new keywords “async” and “await” could be used to make one sequential method asynchronous. Hence the new way of developing asynchronous program replaces the traditional approach where we needed to refactor the code totally to gain asynchrony in our application. Basically, this is done using the StateMachine to store the entire method into a form of states, and each states are delegated into batch of statements. The Task.ContinueWith is used in the system to ensure that the method body gets executed sequentially. Yes, it’s a compiler trick. If you want to know more about it, please read through my entire article on “Async CTP”.

Application Bar for your Windows Phone 7

If you are working with Windows Phone 7, the first thing that you should have noticed is the very own Application bar. Application Bar is present in most of the applications that you use in your Windows Phone 7. This is basically a standard Toolbar with a menu associated with it which allows you to enumerate the commonly used commands in a standard location. While creating your application, Microsoft strongly recommends you to add an application bar, to ensure the user have common behaviour for every application. You can think Application bar similar to TaskBar of windows.

Components of Application Bar

An application Bar is made up with two components:

1. ApplicationBar Buttons
2. ApplicationBar Menu


The applicationbar buttons are always visible for an application which is used to list only the items that needed to be frequently used while dealing with the application. Lets say you create a Text processing application, you can list the File->Open and File-Save commands as ApplicationBarButtons.

ApplicationBarMenu pops up when the user clicks on either the blank space of the application bar or the special button with 3 dots. The Application Menu is used to list the items that are not used often but needed sometimes in the context.

Silverlight 5 Beta - Lets deal with its features

In MIX 2011, we can see our very own silverlight new version called Silverlight 5 beta is released. Yes, if you are looking for it, its time to download the beta and try them out. The major goal of Silverlight 5 is to move the silverlight development more towards the WPF and hence releasing some of the benefits that you already enjoy being a WPF developer is now available to silverlight. In this post lets talk about the features that were introduced with Silverlight one by one.

To install Silverlight 5

To try the features, you first need to download the Beta. Lets follow the steps to install silverlight in your machine.

1. You first need to download Visual Studio 2010 (SP 1) if you didn't have done that already. 
2. After you install Visual studio update you need Silverlight tools for Visual Studio
3. Optionally you can also try Silverlight help tools to get started.

Now after you are done with this, lets talk about few basic features introduced in Silverlight 5.

Silverlight 5 Features 

You should notice that there are few major benefits that are not present yet with Silverlight 5 beta, to name a few :

• Our old requirement to support 64 Bit is not present
• You still cannot launch external applications (using PInvoke) with elevated trust level
• DataContextChanged is still not present.
• Vector Printing