Windows Phone 7.5 Live Tiles

WP7 provides a very different user experience compare with android and iOS. One of the obvious difference is Live tile. The new way of visualize the notifications or alerts seems caught a lot of users attention. The clear, clean (and HUGE font) seems very usable to a lot of users.

As a developer, I’m trying to implement the notifications similar to live tiles into my application. After rounds of research, I’m shock that the SDK does provides a way to do notification for the count BUT the looks and feel seems like iOS or Android!!!!

iPhone

Android

Default Tiles update from WP7.1 SDK

Don’t you think the looks and feel are similar to the other 2 platforms? So, if you trying to do something like the following using existing library it going to be the roller coaster ride

After days of research, I decided to come out with a library to achieve something that looks like WP7 native applications (such as Mail, text, calls)

 

Step-by-Step

Download the GainSecure.WindowsPhone.dll

Prepare a icon with white color path and transparent background. ***please set the icon to 80×80 pixels ***

Add the icon file into existing project

Set the Build Action into Content

Create a ShellTile object

Create an object of the LiveTile and add the handler to manage the event when tile is generated

Create a BitmapImage object

Setting the following properties to the liveTile object

Once the properties been set, we can generate the tile by run the Generate() method

Once the tile been generated, we can receive the generated tile in LiveTile_TileGenerated event

 

The tutorial above will shows result as below

 

You can refer the full source code here

 

Enjoy!!!!!!!!

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