Showing the ProgressIndicator in a Panorama Page

Earlier on twitter, I asked “Anyone know if the SystemTray ProgressIndicator can be used on a panorama page in #wp7? Not showing for me unless systray shown #wpdev“. The problem was when you set the SystemTray to be visible you ended up not having the normal panorama experience as everything gets shunted down. If you turn the SystemTray off, then you don’t get the ProgressIndicator showing.

The Solution

Set the SystemTray’s Opacity to anything other than 1.0 (default). In your Panorama page’s Xaml, that looks like this:

shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True"
shell:SystemTray.Opacity="0" 

This will give you the same effect that the foursquare app gives you, ie, the SystemTray icons can be made visible (by tapping in that region) but it doesn’t reserve the space it would normally.