In a Windows Phone application that I am currently developing I needed to be able to retrieve
the Application Title of
the phone application. You can set
the Deployment Title in
the Properties of your Windows Phone Application, however getting to this value programmatically can be a little tricky.
This article assumes that you have Visual Studio 2010 and
the Windows Phone tools installed along with it.
The Windows Phone tools must be downloaded separately and installed with Visual Studio2010. You may also download
the free Visual Studio2010 Express for Windows Phone developer environment.
The WMAppManifest.xml File
First off you need to understand that when you set
the Deployment Title in
the Properties windows of your Windows Phone application, this title actually gets stored into an XML file located under
the \Properties folder of your application. This XML file is named WMAppManifest.xml. A portion of this file is shown in
the following listing.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><Deployment http://schemas.microsoft.com/windowsphone/2009/deployment"http://schemas.microsoft.com/windowsphone/2009/deployment" AppPlatformVersion="7.0"> <App xmlns="" ProductID="{71d20842-9acc-4f2f-b0e0-8ef79842ea53}" Title="Mobile Time Track" RuntimeType="Silverlight" Version="1.0.0.0" Genre="apps.normal" Author="PDSA, Inc." Description="Mobile Time Track" Publisher="PDSA, Inc."> ... ... </App></Deployment>
Notice
the “Title” attribute in
the <App> element in
the above XML document. This is
the value that gets set when you modify
the Deployment Title in your Properties Window of your Phone project.
The only value you can set from
the Properties Window is
the Title. All of
the other attributes you see here must be set by going into
the XML file and modifying them directly.
Note that this information duplicates some of
the information that you can also set from
the Assembly Information… button in
the Properties Window. Why Microsoft did not just use that information, I don’t know.
Reading Attributes from WMAppManifest
I searched all over
the namespaces and classes within
the Windows Phone DLLs and could not find a way to
read the attributes within
the <App> element. Thus, I had to resort to good old fashioned XML processing. First off I created a WinPhoneCommon class and added two static methods as shown in
the snippet below:
public class WinPhoneCommon{ /// <summary> /// Returns
the Application Title /// from
the WMAppManifest.xml file /// </summary> /// <returns>The application title</returns> public static string GetApplicationTitle() { return GetWinPhoneAttribute("Title"); }
/// <summary> /// Returns
the Application Description /// from
the WMAppManifest.xml file /// </summary> /// <returns>The application description</returns> public static string GetApplicationDescription() { return GetWinPhoneAttribute("Description"); }
... GetWinPhoneAttribute method here ...}
In your Windows Phone application you can now simply call WinPhoneCommon.GetApplicationTitle() or WinPhone.GetApplicationDescription() to retrieve
the Title or Description properties from
the WMAppManifest.xml file respectively. You notice that each of these methods makes a call to
the GetWinPhoneAttribute method. This method is shown in
the following code snippet:
/// <summary>/// Gets an attribute from
the Windows Phone WMAppManifest.xml file/// To use this method, add a reference to
the System.Xml.Linq DLL/// </summary>/// <param name="attributeName">The attribute to read</param>/// <returns>The Attribute's Value</returns>private static string GetWinPhoneAttribute(string attributeName){ string ret = string.Empty;
try { XElement xe = XElement.Load("WMAppManifest.xml"); var attr = (from manifest in xe.Descendants("App") select manifest).SingleOrDefault(); if (attr != null) ret = attr.Attribute(attributeName).Value; } catch { // Ignore errors in case this method is called // from design time in VS.NET }
return ret;}
I love using
the new LINQ to XML classes contained in
the System.Xml.Linq.dll. When I did a Bing search
the only samples I found for reading attribute information from WMAppManifest.xml used either an XmlReader or XmlReaderSettings objects. These are fine and work, but involve a little extra code. Instead of using these, I added a reference to
the System.Xml.Linq.dll, then added two using statements to
the top of
the WinPhoneCommon class:
using System.Linq;using System.Xml.Linq;
Now, with just a few lines of LINQ to XML code you can
read to
the App element and extract
the appropriate attribute that you pass into
the GetWinPhoneAttribute method.
Notice that I added a little bit of exception handling code in this method. I ignore
the exception in case you call this method in
the Loaded event of a user control. In design-time you cannot access
the WMAppManifest file and thus an exception would be thrown.
Summary
In this article you learned how to retrieve
the attributes from
the WMAppManifest.xml file. I use this technique to grab information that I would otherwise have to hard-code in my application. Getting
the Title or Description for your Windows Phone application is easy with just a little bit of LINQ to XML code.
NOTE: You can download
the complete sample code at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "Get Application Title from Windows Phone" from
the drop-down.
Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff
** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free video on Silverlight entitled Silverlight XAML for
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