Creating a Custom Audio Player Agent

An audio player agent can be created by selecting the Windows Phone Audio Playback Agent project type from the Visual Studio New Project dialog (see Figure 34.1). This produces a new project that includes a class that derives from AudioPlayerAgent.

FIGURE 34.1 Visual Studio Windows Phone agent projects.

When you link to an Audio Player Agent project from your main project, a BackgroundServiceAgent task definition is added to your main project’s WMAppManifest.xml file, resembling the following:

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<Tasks>
  <DefaultTask  Name="_default" NavigationPage="MainPage.xaml"/>
  <ExtendedTask Name="BackgroundTask">
      <BackgroundServiceAgent Specifier="AudioPlayerAgent"
           Name="<Unique name within the app>"
           Source="<Assembly>"
           Type="<Namespace.Class>" />
  </ExtendedTask>
</Tasks>

It is not necessary to use Visual Studio’s Audio Player Agent project template to create a custom background audio agent. You can create the class and add the task definition to the WMAppManifest.xml file manually if you so choose.