My previous couple of posts have been related to the Sharing functionality provided by the Charming libraries. This one looks at a smaller (but no less exciting) component. For Windows Phone development if you want to retrieve the app information at runtime you have to read the WMAppManifest.xml file included in the package. In Windows 8 an API was provided (Windows.ApplicationModel.Package and related classes) to provide a strongly typed API around the Windows Store metadata. Although these classes are present in Windows Phone projects they aren’t all implemented and you can waste a lot of time getting exceptions assuming that the functionality will work.
Enter Charming ApplicationModel. This replicates the same object model you see for Windows Store apps but in a way which actually works and reads information from the xap. In addition to this there is an added property – Capabilities which returns the combination of capabilities requested by your package. This has been especially useful in developing the other Charming libraries as it makes it possible to add functionality only when certain capabilities are added in the consuming app. For example you won’t get any nasty surprises if you add the Share library and not the Proximity capability – the library won’t include the “Tap+Share” option.
Beyond the other Charming libraries you can use this library yourself – for example write a generic About page which is populated at runtime by the app metadata. The library is tiny, you won’t need to mess about with XML parsing and it gives you the potential of sharing more code between Phone and Store projects.
ApplicationModel is the only one of the Charming libraries which doesn’t expose any UI. As already stated it is used by Charming Share, and also Charming Settings and as of 8.1 it will also be used by Charming Search but more of that in the next post…
In The Hand Ltd 