Windows Phone Shell Tool Guide

This guide shows how to use Cordova's set of platform-centered shell tools to develop Windows Phone apps for both versions 7 and 8. This development path, discussed in the Overview, may offer you a greater range of development options for the Windows Phone platform than the cross-platform CLI tool described in The Command-Line Interface. Before using either development path, you must first configure the SDK environment as described in the Windows Phone 7 Platform Guide or the Windows Phone 8 Platform Guide.

To enable shell tools for Windows Phone development, download Cordova from cordova.apache.org. The download contains separate archives for each platform. Expand each you wish to target, wp8 in this case, which in turn is forked into wp7 and wp8 subdirectories. The relevant tools are typically available in the top-level bin directory, otherwise consult the README file for more detailed directions.

These tools allow you to create, build, and run apps. For information on the all-purpose command-line interface that enables plugin features, see Using Plugman to Manage Plugins. See Application Plugins for details on how to develop plugins.

Windows Phone

The Windows Phone command-line tools support creating, building, and running new projects. Commands must be run from a cmd or powershell prompt.

The WP8 repo now includes code to build both WP7 and WP8 apps. The repo has subdirectories for each: wp7/ and wp8/.

Create a Project

There are 2 ways to go about creating a new Apache Cordova WP7 or WP8 application.

Run the Batch File to Create and Install the Templates

  • The root of the repo contains a createTemplates.bat file. Double-clicking it generates two .zip files: CordovaWP7_x_x_x.zip and CordovaWP8_x_x_x.zip, where 3.3.0 represents the current version number. To easily use these files in Visual Studio, copy them to My Documents\Visual Studio 2012\Templates\ProjectTemplates\. You are then able to create new Apache Cordova Windows Phone apps from Visual Studio's File → New Project menu.

  • If you run the batch file from the command line, you can also call with a parameter to install automatically

Run the script :

    >createTemplates.bat -install

Use the Create Scripts on the Command Line

Run the create command, specifying the existing path to the project, the reverse-domain-style package identifier, and the app's display name. Here is the syntax for both Windows Phone 7 and 8:

    >.\wp7\bin\create PathToNewProject [ PackageName ] [ AppName ]
    >.\wp8\bin\create PathToNewProject [ PackageName ] [ AppName ]

    >PathToNewProject : The path to where you wish to create the project
    >PackageName      : The namespace for the project (default is Cordova.Example)
    >AppName          : The name of the application (default is CordovaWP8AppProj or CordovaWP7AppProj)

    >examples:
    >.\wp7\bin\create C:\path\to\my_new_project
    >.\wp8\bin\create C:\path\to\my_new_project io.cordova.example CordovaWP8App

Launch Visual Studio and open Solution file (.sln) in (C:\path\to\my_new_project)

Build and Run it

Building the Project (Clean, then Build)

  • Debug

      $ C:\path\to\my_new_project\cordova\build --debug

  • Release

      $ C:\path\to\my_new_project\cordova\build --release

Running the App

Run the 'run' command with the following optional parameters

  • Target specification. This includes --emulator, --device, or --target=<targetID>.

  • Build specification. This includes --debug, --release, or --nobuild.

      $ C:\path\to\my_new_project\cordova\run [Target] [Build]

By default the run command is called with --emulator --debug if flags are not provided.

Cleaning

    $ C:\path\to\my_new_project\cordova\clean