How to Quit a WP7 Silverlight Application

Customizing App.xaml.cs

In the current Beta dev tools for Windows Phone 7, there is no way to exit a Silverlight application (though there is a method to do this for XNA apps).

Currently the best way – and I use the term “best” loosely – to do this is to throw an exception.  An unhandled exception always manages to kill your application.

If we must use a hack, however, we might as well  do it with a bit of finesse.  Below is a simple implementation that can be placed in the App class of a WP7 Silverlight project that clarifies the behavior of the app when we intentionally throw an exception in order to exit rather than simply throwing an exception exceptionally.

This code can be called from anywhere in your app in order to Exit predictably.

Here is the call:

App.Quit();

And here is the implementation in App.xaml.cs:

private class QuitException : Exception { }

public static void Quit()
{
    throw new QuitException();
}

private void Application_UnhandledException(object sender, 
    ApplicationUnhandledExceptionEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.ExceptionObject is QuitException)
        return;

    if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
    {
        System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
    }

    //etc.
}

Windows Phone 8 Update

If you are doing Windows Phone 8 development, things get easier.  After having so many apps going through the store using the above method to exit out, the WP Dev\Design team decided to just implement their own escape method.  Sometimes the doctor is right and sometimes the patient just has a better understanding of what the pain feels like.  To exit out of a Windows Phone 8 app, call Application.Terminate .