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Despite Microsoft’s efforts to steer developers away from XNA, until MonoGame and Unity are out of active development, XNA is still the easiest way to create fast-paced and multimedia-intensive games for Windows Phone 7.5, 7.8 and 8.0. With XNA not being updated to support the new features of Windows Phone 8, you’ve probably heard that XNA can only target the Windows Phone 7.1 API, but that’s not true. In this post I am going to explain the necessary steps to getting your XNA game using secondary Live Tiles via the MangoPollo open-source project when it’s run on Windows Phone 7.8 or 8.0.

Recently I wanted to update my Ener-Jewels XNA games for WP7.8 and 8.0 in order to complete a developer challenge on Nokia’s DVLUP site. The games run on the new OSes just fine, but there was a requirement that any game entered in the challenge would need to support all three new sizes of Live Tiles. To do that, I downloaded the MangoPollo code that includes a Silverlight demo and after some trial and error, found a simple way to use the library in XNA too. Here are the steps:

1. Create your XNA game project and add a reference to the Mangopollo.dll
2. Add a folder for the Live Tile graphics assets to your game project
3. Set the Build Action for these Live Tile graphics to “None” and specify “Copy if Newer”
4. Be sure you’re using Mangopollo.Tiles;
5. Call a function like the one below to create your Live Tile

private void CreateFlipTileWide_Click() {
if (!Utils.CanUseLiveTiles) {
System.Windows.MessageBox.Show("This feature needs Windows Phone 8");
return;
}

ShellTileExt.Create(new Uri("/?msg=from%20wide%20flip%20tile", UriKind.Relative), mytile, true);
}
catch {
System.Windows.MessageBox.Show("remove tile before create it again");
}
}

The only real difference between this code and the similar function in the Silverlight demo is the URI in the ShellTileExt.Create call. In Silverlight, the URI is set to the main page of the app, for example, MainPage.xaml. But in XNA there is no XAML or standard concept of a “main page” file – we primarily just want to launch the game’s xap file when the Live Tile is tapped. Windows Phone uses the URI of title container to launch XNA game .xap files. So rather than the URI being “/MainPage.xaml/?name=val”, as it is in Silverlight apps, we would instead use “/?name=val” in an XNA game.

Note that while this code will run in your WP7.5 game, the ability to add the Live Tile will only be there when the game is run on Windows Phone 7.8 or 8.0. Also note that the XNA demo only includes creating a Wide Flip Tile, even though any of the secondary Live Tile types can be created in a similar manner. See the Silverlight demo for examples of creating the other Live Tile types and similarly modify the URI to use it with XNA.

I’ll be sending my XNA demo project to the authors of Mangopollo today and hopefully they’ll add the missing parts of the Silverlight demo into it and include the XNA demo in the next release of Mangopollo. But if you want to check out the XNA demo now – you can find the code here: Mangopollo 1.3 – Silverlight & XNA.zip

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions about this.