Windows® Phone 8 Unleashed

Using the ApplicationBar

Visual Studio provides you with a starting point by placing the markup for an ApplicationBar in a comment block when you create a new Windows Phone Portrait Page, a Windows Phone Landscape Page, and various Windows Phone projects using the Add New Item and New Project dialogs.

The ApplicationBar requires a namespace alias at the top of your page or control, as shown:

xmlns:shell="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Shell;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"

The markup for an ApplicationBar element is placed in the page’s phone:PhoneApplicationPage element. Placed within it are ApplicationBarIconButton elements and a MenuItems element containing ApplicationBarMenuItem, as shown in the following example:

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