Professional Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Applications and Games Using Visual Studio, Silverlight®, and XNA®

Chapter 7. Application Tiles and Notification

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER

• How to add, and subsequently update, an application tile on the Start screen

• What the Push Notification service is and how to connect to it

• Understanding the different notification types

• Generating different types of push notifications

Part of building a great Windows Phone application is making it feel as though it is part of the users' mobile experience. As a developer, you can take advantage of various integration points that Windows Phone offers to make your application appear more seamless with the device. These include being able to pin the application to the Start area as a tile and using Push Notifications to send updates and alerts.

In this chapter, you will learn that there are three types of Push Notification that you can make use of in order to ensure that users have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips.

APPLICATION TILE

The Start is one of the most important aspects of the Metro user experience on a Windows Phone. It's displayed when the phone is unlocked and when the user presses the Start button on the front of the device. It's the single element of the user interface that is immediately accessible no matter what application the user is in or what they are currently doing. The Start is a launch screen for applications, but more importantly, it is alive with information.

On other mobile platforms, and even desktop platforms such as Windows 7, it is possible to pin an application to the home ...