In this article we are going to see how to programmatically work with creating an alarm in Window phone application. In our previous how to  we have seen how to use the Application bar globally in multiple pages instead of repeating the code in each and every page of the application. So creating an alarm is straight forward by using the Alarm class which is a type of the notification mechanism that is available with the Windows Phone SDK. Alarms allows the user to specify a sound file to play when the notifications are launched from the application with some specific criteria needed by the user. In this article we will see how simple we can use the alarm class and create an alarm which plays a sound that is assigned.     [more]

Let us see the steps on how to achieve this task in our Windows Phone application development. Open Visual Studio 2012 IDE and create a new Windows Phone project with a valid project name as shown in the screen below. 

Clicking on OK will create the project and the solution with the list of default files and folders that are required to run the application. It will take some time to create these files based on your system configuration, so once everything is ready we can see the Visual Studio IDE with the project as shown in the screen below.

Now let us add some controls which are basically required to create an alarm programmatically and show some message once the alarm is created. Let us make it more program oriented, but in real time we can control it based on the inputs from the users as shown in the screen below.

XAML Code:

<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=”Alarm” 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=”Create Alarm” 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>

Now in the code behind let us add some code in the button click event of the Create Alarm button which basically creates an instance of the Alarm class and assign some dummy values which creates an alarm as shown in the code below.

C# Code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Navigation;
using Microsoft.Phone.Controls;
using Microsoft.Phone.Shell;
using F5debugHowto56.Resources;
using Microsoft.Phone.Scheduler;

namespace F5debugHowto56
{
    public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage
    {
        // Constructor
        public MainPage()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            Alarm alarm = new Alarm(“F5debug Alarm”);
            alarm.Content = “This is a test alarm”;
           
            // Uncomment these lines and add the real datetime that is required for the alarm to execute
            //alarm.BeginTime = DateTime.Now;
            //alarm.ExpirationTime = DateTime.Now;
           
            alarm.RecurrenceType = RecurrenceInterval.Daily;
            ScheduledActionService.Add(alarm);
           
            textBlock1.Text = ” Alarm Added Successfully”;
        }      
    }
}

In the above code we have some properties which are to be considered before we write our requirement on top of it. The properties are as follows.

• Name – Unique Name for the Alarm
• Title – This is default name, and we cannot manually set this property
• Content – This property is to set some content for the alarm.
• Begin Time – Beginning of the alarm
• Expiration Time – Expiration time of the alarm
• Recurrence Type – Recurrence type of the alarm
• Sound – Sound file to play for the alarm.

Now we are done with our configuration, 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.