Upgrading your Application from Windows Phone OS 7.0 to 7.1
October 21, 2011
The Fuel Tracker application was originally written and published on Windows Phone OS 7.0. With the release of Windows Phone OS 7.1, the application was revisited in order to decide whether or not to take advantage of the new features present in Windows Phone OS 7.1.
You Will Learn
- How the Fuel Tracker application was upgraded from Windows Phone OS 7.0 to 7.1.
Applies To
Silverlight for Windows Phone OS 7.1
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Because of the backward compatibility between Windows Phone OS 7.0 and 7.1, there were several options when deciding what to do with our application.
- Do nothing. Applications built for 7.0 will continue to be available and run on 7.1.
- Target 7.1 and recompile. Changing your target OS is straightforward in Visual Studio. For more information, see How to: Specify a Target Version or Upgrade Projects for Windows Phone.
- Take advantage of new features to improve our application experience.
The last option was chosen. Because our application was very simple, it required very little work to update it. Following testing, a few issues were cleaned up and the following features were taken advantage of.
- Fast Application Switching. Windows Phone OS 7.1 introduces a dormant state that preserves your application in memory so that when a user navigates back to your application, it will resume almost instantly. Handling the dormant state will result in significant performance improvements for your users, so if you do nothing else, be sure to change this. For more information, see Restoring Your Application After Deactivation.
- New Data Binding features. This version of the Windows Phone uses Silverlight 4 which includes several useful data binding features, including string formatting with the StringFormat property. This allowed us to remove the converters that were used to set the string format in the text boxes. For more information, see What’s New in Silverlight 4.
There are so many new features available in Windows Phone OS 7.1 that Fuel Tracker wasn’t able to demonstrate. Some of the other new features included in Windows Phone OS 7.1 are multitasking, background agents, new sensors, local database, and sockets support. For more information, see What's New in the Windows Phone SDK and Windows Phone OS Application Compatibility.