Introduction to tiles in Windows phone app

In this blog post I shall be giving you a brief introduction of different types of tile which are available in Windows phone application.

Tiles are nothing but linking an application to the home screen with some options to update the status.

 

There are two types of tiles

1. Primary tile or Default tile – All apps have at least one Tile, known as the Primary Tile, which displays on the Start screen when a customer pins your app from the App list.

2. Secondary Tile – This type is basically created programmatically by the application based on the user interaction. This type of Tile will be used to navigate to the application and can be create only one instance for a single tile. We need to use Create(Uri, ShellTileData) method to create a secondary tile.

 

Note: There is only one primary tile for an application that is present on start screen. But there can be one or more secondary tiles that can be pinned to start screen by an application.

 

Different Tile templates

There are three different types of Tile templates which are available in Windows phone of different sizes

 

FlipTile

This tile consists of two parts, one front and one back. The tile flips between these two. The flip tile can contain both images and texts.

 


 

Cycle Tile

Cyclic tile contains up to 9 images which are changed in a cycle. There can also be text etc in the tile but the text are the same of all images since the image are just background images.

 


 

Iconic Tile

This shows a fix tile but with changeable text and numbers .Can also contain an icon of the app.

 


 

In the following posts I will explain you how to create, update and delete different types of tiles on start screen and their properties.

 

Different tile templates and their properties in Windows phone
How to create Secondary tiles on Windows phone start screen using c#
How to update and delete Secondary tiles on Windows phone start screen using c#