Windows Phone 8– The new controls and launchers, choosers

Here is a quick overview of the new and updated controls and launcher and chooser tasks that comes with de Windows Phone 8.0 SDK. Further details I will post later on.

ViewportControl

• More “primitive” than ScrollViewer
• Able to update bounds dynamically
• Designed specifically for touch-specific scenarios
• Base-control for LongListSelector
• Input is off-thread

 

WebBrowser

• IE10-based
• Supports HTML5
• Local storage, CSS3
• Supports gestures

Pivot, Panorama control

These controls are updated and contains fixes for better performance and a better memory management.

Progressbar

Nobody uses the old progressbar of the Windows Phone SDK 7.x, because the progressbar blocks your UI thread. For the Windows Phone 8.0 these issues now fixed and the progressbar updates works not longer in the UI thread.

New LongListSelector control

The Windows Phone 8 SDK includes a new LongListSelector control that implements a jump-list style of UI that is usually used to display long lists of data. The control supports full UI and data virtualization and is actually recommended even for displaying flat lists.

It is compatible with the ListBox control.

Maps

Bing Maps is deprecated and the new Maps controls use technology supllied by Nokia. The new features are

• Vector-based for faster rendering
• Four cartographic map modes
• Light and dark color modes
• Display of landmarks and pedestrian features
• Offline capability with apps wide caching

The new Map control is in the Microsoft.Phone.Maps.Contols namespace, in the Microsoft.Phone.Maps assembly, and in order to use it in XAML you must add the following namespace in your XAML:

xmlns:maps="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Maps.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Maps"

New Location APIs

The Windows Phone 8 SDK comes with new Location APIs exposed through the Geolocator class. Continuous location tracking is now easier to implement, and you can even track the phone’s location in the background, which opens a range of new opportunities. You can even get the current location more efficiently and improve battery life using the new GetGeopositionAsync method.

New Launcher und Choosers

Windows Phone 8 SDK comes with several new Launchers which are exposed through the following classes:

• SaveAppointmentTask – prompts the user to create a new appoint-ment
• MapsTask – launches the built-in map app
• MapsDirectionsTask – launches the built-in map app with directions
• MapDownloaderTask – launches the map downloader for the built-in map app
• ShareMediaTask – prompts the us-er to share a media file

I am working these days on samples for the new controls. My results will be posted here.