Working With Camera in Windows Phone 7

public MainPage()

{

InitializeComponent();

ccTask = new CameraCaptureTask();

}

private void btnCamera_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

ccTask.Show();

}

Now practically the camera application is invoked and with the inbuilt options we can capture the picture, now to save the picture we need to have a mechanism which can be done with the help of CameraCaptureTask Completed args. To do that first let us write some code to get the captured image and assign it to the image viewer control and then we will see on when to trigger this option. Write the below code in a separate method which normally gets the Photoresult and decode it to a byte array to show in on the image viewer control.

C# Code

private void ccTaskCompleted(object sender, PhotoResult pr)

{

byte[] imgLocal;

if (pr.ChosenPhoto != null)

{

imgLocal = new byte[(int)pr.ChosenPhoto.Length];

pr.ChosenPhoto.Read(imgLocal, 0, imgLocal.Length);

pr.ChosenPhoto.Seek(0, System.IO.SeekOrigin.Begin);

var bitmapImage = PictureDecoder.DecodeJpeg(pr.ChosenPhoto);

this.imgCaptured.Source = bitmapImage;

}

}

Now we are done with our code to show the captured image to the imageviewer control (imgCaptured). Now when to trigger this code so that the image captured can be retrieved. We need to do this at the CameraCapturedTask completed event to do that we need to go back to the MainPage constructor at the top and add the below code.

C# Code

public MainPage()

{

InitializeComponent();

ccTask = new CameraCaptureTask();

ccTask.Completed += ccTaskCompleted;

}

So the CameraCaptureTask completed will trigger the method to do the necessary to show the image in the image control. Now we are ready to build and check the output of the application. To do that Press F5 directly from the keyboard or by pressing build and execute option from the Visual Studio Tool Bar. Once the application is build and executed successfully we can see the output in the Windows Phone 7 Emulator as shown in the screen below.

Now to invoke the camera click on the InvokeCamera button and we can see the Camera Application is invoked. We will see an empty screen with the camera in built buttons as shown in the screen below.

Now click on the button at the top right corner so that the we can capture some image using the windows phone 7 emulator. Since we are using the emulator we will see a white screen with a rectangle to it. We can click on the Accept button at the bottom to capture the image as shown in the screen below. If we want to take a new image we can click on the Retake to capture again.

Now click on the Accept and we can see the image captured is assigned to the image viewer control on the main page as shown in the screen below. We can see a dull image since we are using the Windows Phone 7 Emulator, if we deploy the application on to the real device we can get a very good resolution of the picture.

Conclusion

So in this article we have seen how to use the Camera Application to capture the images and use in the development of our application as per the requirements. Also we have seen the Launchers and Choosers CameraCaptureTask to build the application to capture the picture.

Thanks for reading my article. If you like my blog and if you are interested in getting the latest updates on new articles, kindly follow me through one of these options.