Windows Phone 8 Samples July Update

In June we gave you a rundown of the last 10 samples we published on Code Gallery. I am pleased to announce that we’ve uploaded another 4 samples. In today’s post I summarize what each sample demonstrates. You can check out all of our samples on MSDN.

Free App with Paid Products

This sample illustrates how to offer in-app products in your free app. With this model you can ship your app for free but still make money by charging for advanced features, functionality, or virtual goods. The sample uses the Windows.ApplicationModel.Store APIs and shows how to offer a single product, in addition to how to implement a more advanced catalog of products.

Environment Recipes

Want to check whether your app is running in the emulator or on a low-memory device, or check what sensors are available on the phone? The seven recipes in this sample demonstrate how to use various Windows Phone APIs to discover all this environment information and more. We try something different in this sample. When you run the sample on your phone, you can copy and paste, and even email the recipe code directly from the running sample. Let us know if you find this useful.

Passing Data between Pages

Your Windows Phone apps likely have more than one page, and need to pass data from one page to the next. On the Windows Phone platform you have a variety of ways to accomplish this common task. This sample demonstrates five methods for passing data from one XAML page to another page.

Periodic Background Agents for Tiles and Toasts

This sample demonstrates how to create a periodic task to update a Tile, or to create a periodic task to display a toast notification. This is a great way to reach out to your users and keep them informed about your app, even when your app is not running in the foreground.