Revision as of 06:17, 15 November 2012

This article demonstrates how to create a splash screen with an animated progress bar on Windows Phone.

Introduction

The default splash screen in Windows Phone 7 application is a static image of the right size that you declare as a resource with name splashscreenimage.jpg and set as type "content" . This article shows how you can replace this splash screen with another - in this case one that contains an animated progress bar.

The new splashscreen uses the Popup class to display content on top of existing content. To remove "flicker" our new splashscreen will use the same static splashscreen as a background, but overlay it with the animated progress bar. The BackgroundWorker class is used to run startup operations in a separate thread, and when complete it closes the Popup class.

Splash Screen

Implementation

First create a project with Windows Phone Application Template. Once the project is being created, create a Windows Phone User Control SplashScreenControl.xaml and add ProgressBar, TextBlock and Image in it. The image is the default splash of the project.

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White" Width="480" Height="800">            
<ProgressBar HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="47,692,0,89" Name="progressBar1" Width="383"  />  
<Image Height="512" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="0,0,0,0" Name="image1" Stretch="Fill" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="480" Source="SplashScreenImage.jpg" />            
<TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="185,656,0,114" Name="textBlock1" Text="Please Wait..." Width="111" Foreground="Black" FontSize="22" />        
</Grid>

In MainPage.xaml.cs constructor we called a function ShowSplash() to load the popup.

private void ShowSplash()
        {
            this.popup = new Popup();
            this.popup.Child = new SplashScreenControl();
            this.popup.IsOpen = true;
            StartLoadingData();
        }

We initialize the Popup class and then set SplashScreenControl class to be hosted in the popup. IsOpen() opens the popup. Till now the code will load the splash screen (popup) with the progress bar.

Now we will add some background process, and when the background process gets completed we will close the popup as a result user will see the splash screen. Function StartLoadingData() starts and complete the background work.

private void StartLoadingData()
        {
            backroungWorker = new BackgroundWorker();
            backroungWorker.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(backroungWorker_DoWork);
            backroungWorker.RunWorkerCompleted += new RunWorkerCompletedEventHandler(backroungWorker_RunWorkerCompleted);
            backroungWorker.RunWorkerAsync();
        }

First we initialize the BackgroundWorker class. We called RunWorkerAsync() function to starts execution of a background operation and thus backroungWorker_DoWork() is called.

void backroungWorker_DoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
        {
            //here we can load data
            Thread.Sleep(9000);
        }

Here we use the Sleep() function to wait for some time. When backroungWorker_DoWork() gets expired, backroungWorker_RunWorkerCompleted() is called which closes the popup.

 
void backroungWorker_RunWorkerCompleted(object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e)
        {
            this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() =>
            {
                this.popup.IsOpen = false;
            }
            );
        }

Thus user can see a splash screen with the progress bar.

To make a continuous progress bar we add the below code in SplashScreenControl.xaml.cs

this.progressBar1.IsIndeterminate = true;

Source Code

The full source code of the example is available here: File:SplashBar.zip