Chapter 8. Taming the Application Bar

The Windows Phone application bar provides a standard way of accessing common tasks within your app, and makes it easier for users to use your app by leveraging existing familiarity with a control that is used across all apps. Users are able to focus on content, rather than being distracted by having to learn an entirely new interface for each new app. The existence of the application bar also means that you as a developer do not have to reinvent the wheel every time you create a new app.

The application bar plays the same role as a combined toolbar and menu in a desktop or web application. It allows you to define a set of buttons and/or menu items that raise events when a user taps them.

This chapter explores the built-in application bar and its associated button and menu item classes. Most of this chapter is, however, devoted to a custom application bar, which is a wrapper for the built-in application bar and overcomes many of the built-in application bar’s inherent limitations. The custom application bar improves on its built-in counterpart by providing support for data binding, commanding, toggle and hyperlink buttons, and controlling the visibility of menu items and buttons at runtime. Moreover, it is more compatible with design patterns like MVVM that rely on data binding.