Saturday, September 4, 2010

Windows Phone 7 Quick Tip #1 – Use App.Resources for your Application Title

On most screens within your Windows Phone 7 application you might need to display your application name.  This might be in a simple page or one that contains a Pivot or Panorama.

Standard Page

image

Pivot Page

image

Panorama Page

image

With the XAML that gets generated you can enter your application name for the respective page types as:

image

image 

image

Notice how the same text is entered for each title as a string literal?

A better solution is to use a string resource.  To create a string resource, add the following to your Application.Resources node within the App.xaml file.

image

Then everywhere you need to use your application name you can use the following syntax

image

-twb

3 comments:

  1. Hi, thanks for the blog, I really do like what/how you've done this, very DRY. But when I do exactly as you did (with very simple, out of the box, WP7 template with current tools) I get "'clr' is an undeclared prefix"

    Any suggestions?

    ReplyDelete
  2. AHA! I was able to figure out I was missing this namespace which isn't/wasn't part of the default template.

    xmlns:clr="clr-namespace:System;assembly=mscorlib"

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you for this, I just blogged about it (and of course gave you credit for the IP and inspiration! :>)

    http://www.pchenry.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/340/Default.aspx

    ReplyDelete