In this short tutorial we are going to see how to Create a Splash screen in Windows Phone 7 application development. Splash Screens are nothing but a nice animation or an image shown while an application or a game is loading background. Splash screen provides the user with real effect on how the application will look like. Internally if we can see, Splash screens are mainly used when a large application take some time to collect all the resources to load it completely which the splash screen shows the image in full screen. Today we are going to see how we are going to create a splash screen for Windows Phone 7 application.       [more]

Splash screen should follow some basic criteria in Windows Phone application development as below.

• The image should be of 480 x 800 pixels only
• The image should be of named Splashscreenimage.jpg only.
• The Build Property of this Splash Screen file should be Content always.

We can use a static image as a Splash Screen or as well we can use an Animated image but with some things like creating a background processor and other stuffs which should not overwhelm the application performance. Now let us see how we can create one splash screen for our windows phone 7 application. 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.

Now let us create a splash screen using paint or a image editor tool of your choice but keep in consideration that the splash screen should be of the desired points that are recommended by Microsoft. If its failed then our application will be failed in the Certification process which normally will be done while uploading the application to Marketplace. Our Splash screen which we designed looks like below.

Now add the splash screen to the project with the name as shown in the screen below and We can customize it as per the requirement.

Now we are done with the changes, basically added the splash screen as per our design requirement.  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 change the splash screen and the basic requirements that are to be considered before changing the splash screen. Also we can add animated splash screen using the background worker processor. That’s it from this tutorial on Windows Phone see you all in the next tutorial soon. Mean while Happy Programming!!!