Frequently,
you will want to include documentation with your application to
advertise its features to users and answer their most common questions.
Because of its simplicity and ubiquity, HTML, the same language used to
create web pages, has become the default format for such documentation.
In this section, you'll create a simple HTML page describing how to work
with the car photo application that you created in the previous
section. Follow these steps to create and show HTML content on Windows
Phone 7.
Because
adding an HTML file is not an option on Windows Phone 7, you will need
to add a new XML file to the project. XML files support automated syntax
verification features, making it harder for you to make accidental
mistakes. Right-click the WebBrowserSample project in the Solution
Explorer and select Add => New Item. Then, select XML File from the list of available item types. Type
the following in the newly created file (you can also copy and paste
this code from the files available for download for this book). <html>
<title>Web Browser Help File</title>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to the Windows Phone 7 Car Browser Application!
To view the car photos, type the name of the car in the textbox and press "Show It!"
<br/><br/>For example, "Ford Mustang"</h1>
</body>
</html>
Save the file by pressing the Save button in Visual Studio. Next, right-click XMLFile1.xml in the Solution Explorer and click Rename. Change the name of that file to Help.htm and make sure that the Build action for that file is set to "Content" (by right-clicking and selecting Properties to bring up the Properties window). While you would expect the Help.htm
file to be automatically available to the application running on
Windows Phone 7, it isn't. Before it is available to your application,
the Help.htm file created in the
previous step needs to be available to your application in the Isolated
Storage, which you can think of as disk space reserved for use by your
application on Windows Phone 7. As your application loads, you'll need
to copy Help.htm to an Isolated
Storage location first, and then retrieve it from there for display by
the WebBrowser control. For the time being, simply add the following using directives to the top of the code page and then copy into your code the SaveHelpFileToIsoStore method shown in Listing 1. using System.IO.IsolatedStorage;
using System.Windows.Resources;
using System.IO;
Listing 1. SaveHelpFiletoIsoStore Method
private void SaveHelpFileToIsoStore()
{
string strFileName = "Help.htm";
IsolatedStorageFile isoStore = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication();
//remove the file if exists to allow each run to independently write to
// the Isolated Storage
if (isoStore.FileExists(strFileName) == true)
{
isoStore.DeleteFile(strFileName);
}
StreamResourceInfo sr = Application.GetResourceStream(new Uri(strFileName,
UriKind.Relative));
using (BinaryReader br = new BinaryReader(sr.Stream))
{
byte[] data = br.ReadBytes((int)sr.Stream.Length);
//save file to Isolated Storage
using (BinaryWriter bw = new BinaryWriter(isoStore.CreateFile(strFileName)))
{
bw.Write(data);
bw.Close();
}
}
}
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Finally, you will invoke the SaveHelpFileToIsoStore method you wrote earlier to display the contents of Help.htm in the web browser when the browser first loads. Add the call to SaveHelpFileToIsoStore in the webBrowser1_Loaded method and set the webBrowser URL to navigate to the Help.htm file, as shown here: void webBrowser1_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
SaveHelpFileToIsoStore();
webBrowser1.Navigate(new Uri("Help.htm", UriKind.Relative));
}
Press F5 to run the application. You should see the simple HTML Help page displayed in the WebBrowser control.
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