Windows® Phone 7 Application Development 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 26. Optimizing Performance

One of the main areas of focus for Microsoft when it began developing Windows Phone 7 was improving the overall user experience. It sought to do this by providing a more standardized hardware platform than previous versions of Windows Phone devices and by requiring that applications developed for Windows Phone 7 use only managed code. These changes provide a more stable and better-performing platform, but there are areas within your application development that will affect how your application performs on this new platform.

STARTING UP YOUR APPLICATION

There are several changes you can make to the way your application starts up that will improve the user's perception of how well it performs. Adjusting the splash screen, minimizing code within the start-up page constructor, and splitting your application into smaller assemblies will all work to improve application performance.

Using a Splash Screen

When loading your application you may decide to preload some of its resources to ensure they will be available before the application is ready for user interaction. The splash screen is an initial content area displayed to the user when your application first begins to load. All Windows Phone project templates include the standard splash screen image shown in Figure 26-1.

By default the splash screen image is named SplashScreenImage.jpg and is configured to appear automatically when your application is starting. You can use the default splash screen image ...