Managing user contacts and appointments (XAML)

Article
10/05/2015

[This article is for Windows 8.x and Windows Phone 8.x developers writing Windows Runtime apps. If you’re developing for Windows 10, see the latest documentation]

Purpose

You can let your users access their contacts and appointments so they can share content, email, calendar info, or messages with each other, or whatever functionality you design.

To see a few different ways in which your app can access contacts and appointments, see these topics:

In this section

Topic	Description
Quickstart: Selecting user contacts	Through the Windows.ApplicationModel.Contacts namespace, you have several options for selecting contacts. Here, we'll show you how to select a single contact or multiple contacts, and we'll show you how to configure the contact picker to retrieve only the contact information that your app needs.
Quickstart: Finding and retrieving user contacts	Windows Phone provides methods for finding and retrieving contacts on the device. This topic will show you how to use these APIs. This feature is for apps that only want to read contact information from the device. If you want to create a contact store on the device for your app, see Quickstart: Managing app contact stores.
Managing contact cards	Through the Windows.ApplicationModel.Contacts.ContactManager class, you have several options for showing a contact card. Here, we'll show you how to display a contact card by using initial data in the Contact object and also by using a ContactCardDelayedDataLoader object to update the contact card in a delayed fashion.
Quickstart: Handling contact actions	Through the Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation namespace, you can provide data to an app when it's activated for several contact actions (Windows.ApplicationModel.Contacts.ContactLaunchActionVerbs). Here, we'll show you how to handle app activation when a user attempts to make a phone call to a contact, send a message to a contact, or get the map to a contact's address.
Quickstart: Managing app contact stores	On Windows Phone, you can create a contact store for your app. When you save contacts to this store, they will appear on the phone’s People hub, integrated with the user’s other contacts. Your contact store can use the standard set of contact properties, such as name and address, but you can also store custom properties for each contact. Custom properties are not displayed on the contact card in the People hub, but can be accessed programmatically from your app. The contact store APIs also provide a mechanism for you to enumerate changes between your app contact store on the phone and a contact store you maintain in a cloud service in order to synchronize the two stores.
Quickstart: Managing appointments	Through the Windows.ApplicationModel.Appointments namespace, you can create and manage appointments in a user's calendar app. Here, we'll show you how to create an appointment, add it to a calendar app, replace it in the calendar app, and remove it from the calendar app. We'll also show how to display a time span for a calendar app and create an appointment-recurrence object.
Quickstart: Reading data from app calendars	Windows Phone Store apps can use the APIs in the Windows.ApplicationModel.Appointments namespace to read data from all calendars on the device, including calendars created and managed by other apps, if they allow it. This feature enables your app to provide a different view into the user's calendars than the built-in Calendar app on the device.
Quickstart: Managing app calendars	Windows Phone Store apps can use the APIs in the Windows.ApplicationModel.Appointments namespace to create and manage one or more calendars. You can choose to allow your calendars to be displayed by the built-in Calendar app or by other apps on the device that use calendar data. You can also choose to allow users to edit your appointments within the built-in calendar app.
Quickstart: Sending an email message	This topic shows you how to launch the compose email dialog to allow the user to send an email message. You can pre-populate the fields of the email with data before showing the dialog. The message will not be sent until the user taps the send button.
Quickstart: Sending an SMS message	This topic shows you how to launch the compose SMS dialog to allow the user to send an SMS message. You can pre-populate the fields of the SMS with data before showing the dialog. The message will not be sent until the user taps the send button.