In this article we are going to see how to Check poor signal strength Simulation in your Windows Phone Application development. Simulation can be done using the Dashboard Simulation tool which is a part of the Visual Studio IDE that comes with the Windows Phone SDK. With this tool we can simulate the Slow network Speed, a weak signal strength capability and also the network failure states which we run the application in an emulator or a physical device which is connected to the development machine. [more]
The tool has some inbuilt features to check the Network Speed with options to check with 2G, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi and No Network connections to simulate lower bandwidth to higher bandwidth connections to run the application. The tool also has a feature to check the signal strength options where to check the application against different signal properties like Good, Average and Poor. When selecting the Network speed to No Network we cant use this feature as practically it is not applicable.
Let us see how we can use this tool to simulate the network capabilities in your application development. Open Visual Studio 2012 IDE in administrator mode and open an existing application which we developed in our previous articles as shown in the screen below.
In Visual Studio 2012 IDE, under tools menu we have an option Simulation Dashboard which will be the primary tool to test the scenarios. Click on the Simulation Dashboard will show a popup window as shown in the screen below.
In the Simulation Dashboard we can see the options to Enable Network Simulation (a checkbox) clicking on it will enable both the options. Select the appropriate network Speed and Signal strength the you need to select in your application to handle the data as shown in the screen below.
Using the Simulation Dashboard to simulate the network on a device will prompt to restart the device completely in order to take affect of the network changes.