EvenTiles and TrialMode

In part 17 of EvenTiles we will take a look at Trial Mode. When an application supports trial mode, users can first try the application before buying it. It is up to you as the application developer to determine which functionality is available in the application when running in trial mode. Even though trial mode makes your application slightly more complex, the advantage of implementing trial mode is that you will only have to submit one single version of your application that customers can either try or buy. The application is started with either a trial license or a full license (when the user purchased the application). Inside the application, you can make use of an API to determine if a user is running your application in trial mode or not. From a technical point of view, there are no restrictions to trial mode, so you can even provide full application functionality in trial mode. Of course that does not make sense, because you typically want to use trial mode to invite end users to try your application after which they hopefully get so excited about your application that they determine to buy it.

NOTE: Be careful with providing a limited time to execute a fully functional application in trial mode, because end users can simply reinstall your application to again run the application for a certain amount of time in trial mode.

Let’s assume that EvenTile has two different modes of operation, implemented through Trial Mode. In Trial Mode, EvenTiles is fully functional without restrictions, however, the application will display ads on the main page (adding the actual advertisements to EvenTiles will be covered later in this series). As soon as users purchase EvenTiles, advertisements will be disabled. In trial mode, the application also contains functionality to retrieve location information in order to receive localized advertisements, although the user can disable location retrieval through the Settings Page of the application. However, if a user purchases the application, location information will not be retrieved and it does not make sense to have a toggle switch in the Settings Page to enable / disable location retrieval. Finally, if the user runs EvenTiles in trial mode, they have the option to purchase the application from within the application’s About Page. Of course, this option is only available in trial mode, if the application is already purchases, the About Page allows a user to display more applications that were published by DotNETForDevices.

Let’s begin by finding out how we can determine if the application is currently running in Trial Mode. In order to do so, as long as the user is running the application in Trial Mode, we will check the current application’s license each time the application starts or becomes the foreground application, and set a Boolean property accordingly. We also store the current value of that Boolean property in our application settings. When a user has purchased the application, we only have to check the application settings which results in faster starting / resuming of the application. The following code snippet shows how to determine if we are running in Trial mode:

Running in Trial Mode?
  1. public const string keyTrialMode = "K_TRIAL";
  2. public static bool IsTrialMode { get; private set; }
  3.  
  4. private void Application_Launching(object sender, LaunchingEventArgs e)
  5. {
  6.     if (!appSettings.Contains(keyTrialMode))
  7.     {
  8.         appSettings[keyTrialMode] = true;
  9.     }
  10.  
  11.     IsTrialMode = (bool)appSettings[keyTrialMode];
  12.  
  13.     if (IsTrialMode)
  14.     {
  15.         CheckTrialMode();
  16.     }
  17. }
  18.  
  19. private void CheckTrialMode()
  20. {
  21.     IsTrialMode = new LicenseInformation().IsTrial();
  22. }

This snippet only shows checking for Trial Mode when the application is launched. We first determine if we already stored the current license type in our application settings. If we assume we are running in Trial Mode we need to check if the license type has chanced since the last time the user ran the application. Since correct license information will only be added when the application is downloaded from the Windows Phone Marketplace, it might be a little tricky to test this functionality. When you installed the application locally on an unlocked device during testing of your application, or when you execute the application from within Visual Studio, the LicenseInformation.IsTrial method always returns false. With a little bit of conditional compilation, we can easily change this for test purposes. In the following code snippet you can see that we can test Trial mode when we are running the application in Debug mode and when the TRIAL symbol is defined. By simply setting this symbol to NO_TRIAL we can test the application for both different license types.

Testing Trial Mode
  1. #if DEBUG
  2. #define TRIAL
  3. #endif
  4.  
  5. using System.Windows;
  6. using Microsoft.Phone.Marketplace;
  7.  
  8. namespace EvenTiles
  9. {
  10.     public partial class App : Application
  11.     {
  12.         private void CheckTrialMode()
  13.         {
  14. #if ! TRIAL
  15.             IsTrialMode = new LicenseInformation().IsTrial();
  16. #endif
  17.         }

In the OnLaunching method of the application, the IsTrialMode property is initialized to true and optionally modified by executing the CheckTrialMode method. If you want to test the application as if it was purchased by a user, you can simply change TRIAL to NO_TRIAL, recompile and execute the application again.

NOTE: If you take this approach, make sure that you install a clean copy of the application to a device or the emulator when switching back to trial mode. The way the code is organized, once the IsTrialMode property is set to false, the call to the LicenseInformation.IsTrial method is never executed again. To install a clean copy, make sure to rebuild your application in Visual Studio before deploying it, instead of simply building the application. After a rebuild, not only the application is replaced on the target device, but the entire IsolatedStorage area of the application is cleaned.

Testing a purchased app
  1. #if DEBUG
  2. #define NO_TRIAL
  3. #endif
  4.  
  5. using System.Windows;
  6. using Microsoft.Phone.Marketplace;
  7.  
  8. namespace EvenTiles
  9. {
  10.     public partial class App : Application
  11.     {
  12.         private void CheckTrialMode()
  13.         {
  14. #if ! TRIAL
  15.             IsTrialMode = new LicenseInformation().IsTrial();
  16. #endif
  17.         }

Since Debug is not set in release mode, you will always call the LicenseInformation.IsTrial method when the application is deployed to a device.

Since we now have determined if the application is running in Trial Mode or not, we can simply use this information to display / hide the location retrieval toggle button on the Settings Page. Also, when can alter the functionality of one of the buttons on the About Page. If the application runs in Trial Mode, the user can purchase the application from within the About Page. If the user already has purchased the application, they can use the same button to check more applications from the same publisher, as shown in the following code snippet:

Changing button behavior
  1. public partial class AboutPage : PhoneApplicationPage
  2. {
  3.     public AboutPage()
  4.     {
  5.         InitializeComponent();
  6.  
  7.         btnMore.Content = App.IsTrialMode ? "Purchase EvenTiles now" : "More from DotNETForDevices";
  8.     }
  9.  
  10.     private void btnMore_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
  11.     {
  12.         if (App.IsTrialMode)
  13.         {
  14.             MarketplaceDetailTask detailTask = new MarketplaceDetailTask();
  15.             detailTask.Show();
  16.         }
  17.         else
  18.         {
  19.             var searchTask = new MarketplaceSearchTask
  20.             {
  21.                 ContentType = MarketplaceContentType.Applications,
  22.                 SearchTerms = "DotNETForDevices"
  23.             };
  24.             searchTask.Show();
  25.         }
  26.     }
  27. }

When the application is running, it either shows the location toggle switch and it provides different functionality in the About Page.

image

The following video shows how to add Trial Mode to the EvenTiles application. It also shows how you can test this functionality by making use of some conditional compilation.

Adding TrialMode to the application and testing TrialMode.

To be able to experiment with the functionality of EvenTiles as it is right now, the sample code is available for dowload here. In the next episode of EvenTiles we will talk about adding support to run EvenTiles on 256-MB Windows Phone devices.

EvenTilesYou can already install the latest version of EvenTile on your own Windows Phone. from Marketplace. Remember that the application is not meant to be extremely useful, although it contains similar functionality that “serious” applications have. Just go ahead and get here: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/search?q=EvenTiles (or search on your phone for EvenTiles in the Marketplace application).

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