In this tutorial we are going to see how to customize the properties of the Windows Phone Application project and optimize it based on the requirement. While developing the windows phone application we will start with setting up the properties to debug the application in development environment or locally to test the features. But for the final release the properties should be different so that the application can be build and executed in the Release mode. Here in this tutorial we will see the different project properties that are available with Visual Studio 2012 IDE. [more]
Open Visual Studio 2012 IDE in administrator mode and open an existing project or create your own new project to customize the application properties 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.
Right click on the application project name and click on properties will open the application properties window which has the default properties that are created on application creation as shown in the screen below.
In the properties page we see different options as part of the application project like Application, Debug, ,Build, Build Events, Reference Paths and Code Analysis in the left side menu as shown in the screen above. The first page is the Application properties where we can specify the Target Windows Phone OS version (7.1 or 8.0) and some base configurations to specify the Assembly name, startup object and mainly the Cultures that will be supported in the application as shown in the screen below.
The Debug page has the base settings that can be used to specify whether the app is deactivate or tombstoned on debugging the application and the target device if we need to deploy the device to the emulator or a local device attached or different versions of the Emulator as shown in the screen below.
Next Property page is the Build where we can specify the Output Path where the application should be build and stored, handling Errors and Warning properties as shown in the screen below.
Build events page has option to specify some command line scripts that should be executed before and after we build the application, mainly for utilizing the referencing issues as shown in the screen below.
Reference Paths and Code Analysis as name suggests used to reference some external paths and analysis for the project to execute which we will not have much control. The first 4 major property pages will take over the customization most of the time while developing the application and to differentiate the Debug and Release version we can select the option that is available in the Ribbon Menu at the top based on which the properties will act accordingly.
