A few weeks ago, I’ve decided to test Application InsightsApplication Insights with one of my Windows Phone apps. Application Insights is a library provided by Microsoft that allows you to easily collect usage and performance traces from your app and display them on your Visual Studio Online portal.

The integration in a Windows Phone app is quite easy: reference the NuGet package, and call a method in your application constructor to initialize the component:

If you’re using Visual Studio 2013, you can also install the Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio extension, that will take care of those steps for you. A lot of useful indicators are logged, such as the number of unique users, the version of their OS, their screen resolution, and so on. However, I quickly noticed that the page views weren’t logged, even though there’s a section dedicated to this in the Visual Studio Online portal. Fortunately, the API allows you to manually trace page views, and so I did by hooking the PhoneApplicationFrame.Navigated event:

Then in the event handler, call the LogPageView with the URL of your page:

Make sure you call the TrimStart method to remove any slash at the beginning of your page URI. For some reason, those URI don’t appear in the “Page views” screen of Application Insights.

After a few minutes/hours, you should be able to see the reports. You may notice a few navigations events to a page called “app://external”. They occur when the user navigates away from your app (either when exciting or when a launcher is triggered).

2 Comments

  1. fyi got some html going in your code snippets

    1. Author

      Thanks for the heads-up. I’m in the middle of migrating my blog from http://blog.wpdev.fr, so those formatting errors will probably stay for a few more days 😉

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *