How to add a DatePicker to a Windows Phone 8 app

• 18 May 2014

I've been playing about with Microsoft's Windows Phone developer tools. I wanted to add a Date Picker control. Based on using Xcode I thought this would be easy. It wasn't.

For comparison, here is how you add a Date Picker control to your iPhone or iPad app...

• Start typing "Date" into the search box at the bottom of the Object library in the bottom-right corner of the Xcode window, and the "Date Picker" object quickly appears.
• Drag the object into place.

And here is how you do it in a Windows Phone 8 app.

• Open the Package Manager Console from the Tools menu. Tools -> NuGet Package Manager -> Package Manager Console.

• Within the Package Manager Console type "Install-Package WPtoolkit" to instruct Visual Studio to install the Windows Phone Toolkit.

• Near the top of the XAML file where you want to use a DatePicker add the following line of code: xmlns:toolkit="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit

• Then where you want to include a DatePicker control add the following line of code: <toolkit:DatePicker />

There may be an easier way, but this took over an hour of searching Google and reading through forum posts until I found a way that actually worked.

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