In this tutorial we are going to see how to make use of the Save Email Address task in Windows Phone development. This task is common that will be used in our day to day life, with this task we can save an email address on to a contact on the user selection. Basically we used to get many mails a day, when we want to save the email address from which the mail we received we used to copy the email address and save it to a contact.

With this task we can trigger to save the email address from our application with simple clicks. This task opens the contact application and provides an option to the end user to select the contact to which the email address will be saved. Let us see the steps on how to achieve this task in real time for a Windows phone application.       [more]

Open Visual Studio 2010 IDE and create a new Silverlight for Windows Phone project with a valid project name as shown in the screen below. Once the project is created add some controls which are used to trigger the Save Email Address Task as shown in the screen below.

Now drag and drop few controls to the screen which is used to trigger event that launches the Save Email Address Task. Once we designed the screen with the controls we can see the screen looks like below. We have added a button control to trigger the event and text block control to show the end result after the task is completed as shown in the screen below.

XAML Code:

<phone:PhoneApplicationPage
    x:Class="F5debugHowto25.MainPage"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:phone="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
    xmlns:shell="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Shell;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
    xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
    mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="480" d:DesignHeight="768"
    FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}"
    FontSize="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}"
    Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}"
    SupportedOrientations="Portrait" Orientation="Portrait"
    shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True">

    <!–LayoutRoot is the root grid where all page content is placed–>
    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Transparent">
        <Grid.RowDefinitions>
            <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
            <RowDefinition Height="*"/>
        </Grid.RowDefinitions>

        <!–TitlePanel contains the name of the application and page title–>
        <StackPanel x:Name="TitlePanel" Grid.Row="0" Margin="12,17,0,28">
            <TextBlock x:Name="ApplicationTitle" Text="F5debug How to Series" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}"/>
            <TextBlock x:Name="PageTitle" Text="Save Email Task" Margin="9,-7,0,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}"/>
        </StackPanel>

        <!–ContentPanel – place additional content here–>
        <Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0">
            <Button Content="Trigger Save Email Task" Height="72" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="9,6,0,0" Name="button1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="441" />
            <TextBlock Height="277" HorizontalAlignment="Left" TextWrapping="Wrap" Margin="29,108,0,0" Name="textBlock1" Text="" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="407" />
        </Grid>
    </Grid>

</phone:PhoneApplicationPage>

Now we need to write our code in the button click event to trigger the Save Email Address task, which basically opens the Contacts application to select a contact to which the email address need to be added. To do that just go to the code behind and first add the USING handler code on top with the existing using statements as shown in the code below.

using Microsoft.Phone.Tasks;

Next is to add the below code to the button click event which basically creates an instance of the Save Email Address task and once the event is completed another event is raised which takes the result as output with which we can conclude on the action taken as shown in the code below.

Code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
using Microsoft.Phone.Controls;
using Microsoft.Phone.Tasks;

namespace F5debugHowto25
{
    public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage
    {
        SaveEmailAddressTask seaTask;

        // Constructor
        public MainPage()
        {
            InitializeComponent();

            seaTask = new SaveEmailAddressTask();
            seaTask.Completed += new EventHandler<TaskEventArgs>(seaTask_Completed);
        }

        private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            seaTask.Email = "Karthikeyan@f5debug.net";
            seaTask.Show();
        }

        void seaTask_Completed(object sender, TaskEventArgs e)
        {
            if (e.TaskResult == TaskResult.OK)
            {
                textBlock1.Text = "Email Saved Successfully!!!";
            }
            else if (e.TaskResult == TaskResult.Cancel)
            {
                textBlock1.Text = "User Cancellation!!!";
            }
            else
            {
                textBlock1.Text = "EMail Adress couldnot be saved!!!";
            }
        }
    }
}

Now we are done with our code, just run the application by pressing F5 directly from the keyboard or we can use the Build and execute the project option from the tool bar to run the application. Once the Build is successful we can see the Windows Phone emulator with the application and the expected outputs as shown in the screens below.

Output Screens:

So in this tutorial we have seen how to use the Save Email Address task to save the email address of a specified contact by launching the contact application directly from the application which is very much useful in our day to day tasks. That’s it from this tutorial on Windows Phone see you all in the next tutorial soon. Mean while Happy Programming!!!