You should already be familiar with namespaces; they’re a way to structure your code by assigning a logical path to your class.
By default, Visual Studio assigns namespaces using the same folder structure of the project. This means that if, for example, you have a class called MyClass stored inside a file in the Classes folder, the default full namespace of your class will be Classes.MyClass.
Namespaces in XAML work exactly the same way. The XAML controls are, in the end, classes that are part of your project, so you have to tell the page where it can find them. In the standard page you can see many examples of namespace declarations:
Every namespace starts with the xmlns prefix, which is the standard XML namespace, followed by a custom prefix (in this sample it’s phone). This prefix is very important, because it’s the one that we’re going to use in the rest of the page to add the controls. Then, we define the full namespace that contains the controls. If the class is part of our project, it’s enough to specify just the namespace; otherwise, we also need to define which assembly (that is the DLL’s name) contains the class.
xmlns:phone="clrnamespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;
assembly=Microsoft.Phone" 26
In the previous example, we want to include controls and resources in our page that are defined inside the Microsoft.Phone.Controls namespace, which is included in the Microsoft.Phone.dll library.
The PhoneApplicationPage class gives you an example of how to use a namespace. Since the PhoneApplicationPage class is part of the Microsoft.Phone.Controls namespace, we have to add the prefix phone to the tag to use it:
<phone:PhoneApplicationPage />
It’s very important to understand how namespaces in XAML work, because we’ll need to declare them every time we use third-party controls (that we created on our own or are part of an external library) or resources, like converters.
