Testing Trial Conditions

Providing a trial version of your app may help to improve its monetization. If someone has the opportunity to try out your app, the user may be more likely to purchase it (assuming that it is any good). A usual requirement for an app employing a trial version is to provide the user with a link to buy the app within the app itself. In the following demonstration, you see how to display an application bar button when an app is in trial mode.

The Microsoft.Phone.MarketPlace.LicenseInformation class contains a single method called IsTrial(), which indicates whether your app has been purchased. When a user downloads the trial version of your app from the marketplace, this method returns true. On all other occasions, such as when debugging, this method returns false.

To ensure that an app functions correctly in both scenarios, you abstract the LicenseInformation class.