If you’ve built a Windows Phone 7 application, you may have noticed that if you pin your application to the Start menu, the name of your application appears in the lower, left-hand side of the tile. You can change the text in this tile, by right-clicking on the application and going to properties. On the Application menu, modify the Tile title properties. A sample of this area is displayed below:

tile_options

You’ll notice that the title text is blank in my screenshot. To accomplish this, you’ll need to perform a little magic. If you wipe this out in Visual Studio 2010, you’ll receive the error message stating “An empty string is not allowed for Title” like the following:

error

However, you can blank out this field my modifying the WMAppManifest.xml file located in your project’s properties folder. Modify the section of this file that is highlighted below:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Deployment xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/windowsphone/2009/deployment" AppPlatformVersion="7.0">
    ...
    <Tokens>
      <PrimaryToken TokenID="BarefootToken" TaskName="\_default">
        <TemplateType5>
          <BackgroundImageURI IsRelative="true" IsResource="false">Application\_TileImage\_173x173.png</BackgroundImageURI>
          <Count>0</Count>
          <Title></Title>
        </TemplateType5>
      </PrimaryToken>
    </Tokens>
  </App>
</Deployment>

This will allow your title to be blank and also allow your tile to appear on your device without the title.