Universal Windows Platform - Package.appxmanifest

Introduction

Welcome again! Today I’ll talk about Windows Phone “Package.appxmanifest”. It’s really important to make your app fully complete. Because just designing and lots of code don’t make a good app, the look of the app must be very attractive. Look and feel is very important to attract a customer. Moreover, not only look but also the capabilities and dependencies of an app are need to set in “Package.appxmanifest”.

Exploring Package.appxmanifest

So let’s explore the Windows Phone “Package.appxmanifest”. Just open up the “Package.appxmanifest” from your “Solution Explorer”, and you can see the similar picture below.


                                                                        Figure 1

I’ve used my previous example of Windows Phone XAML Styling here. You can use any of existing application or just create a new one.

Changing Application Title

If you take a look at the picture, “Display name” and “Description” have that same content “XAMLStyling”. Yes, it’s our app name we have given before. But does it look good, when we run the application?



The answer is obviously “No”. So we just need to do little bit of work. Just give a space between “XAML” and “Style”, so it’ll be “XAML Style”.


                                                                        Figure 3

One more thing we’ve to do is, switch to the “Visual Assets” tab and check the “Check Box” below “Title”.


                                                                  Figure 4

After that you’ll get some good visualization of your app’s tiles.



Changing Application Logo

An important thing is to change the application logo. It’s your app’s unique identity. So, select the list item one by one and change your logo. But before that you’ve to upload your logo to your project solution. To do that, right click on the project and add a new folder. Give it a name “Images”. Right click on the folder and click Add, then Existing Item.


                                                                  Figure 6

Upload all required logos of corresponding resolution.


                              Figure 7

Now, locate all the logos in “Visual Assets” section.


                                                                    Figure 8

Format of Logo

Logo must be in “png” format and if it’s transparent then it’ll be better for visualizing some information. Locate all these logos one by one. After you’ve changed the logos, save it. If you run the application, it’ll look like this.



In Windows Store Application, you can find it in All Programs Menu Items. You can also pin it in Start Menu and can resize it.


                                       Figure 10

Other Options

Well, we’ve done some major modification of our application. There’re some other parts like
“Capabilities”.


                                                                   Figure 11

If you use microphone, location service, internet, proximity or any other things, you need to check these options as well. Otherwise your application will not work.

There’re some other options like “Declaration”, “Content URls” and “Packaging”. You can also change these things as well. I’ve shown the common things here.

Summary

So, that’s it. Hope now you have an understanding about Windows Phone “package.appxmanifest”. Keep digging with Visual Studio and try to lean everyday new things. I’ll be here with a new topic soon. Till then good bye. Have a nice day.

Download the full source code.