MIX 2011: Enhanced Push Notifications and Live Tiles for Windows Phone

This session was delivered by Thomas Fennel, Program manager, from Microsoft.

Thomas stated his session by showing what push notifications and tiles are.

Push notification is how you can engage the user when your app is not on the foreground. Tiles are the squares on the Windows Phone home screen.

Toast notifications – on the top.

Tile notifications – most popular – includes data for count, title (of app or arbitrary string) and background image.

Then, Thomas explained the normal architecture for a push notification application:

Following are the typical scenarios / applications that you would want to use push notifications:

This includes:

• Weather apps
• Send to WP7
• Turn based games
• Twitter clients
• Traffic map
• etc.

Thomas then continued with several code samples of these technologies.

That’s it for now,
Arik Poznanski.