Question

I understood that my previous question was too vague and didn’t explain awfully much. I hope this post will be more understandable.

I’m currently creating an app which will pull certain @Twitter feeds as well as certain Twitter #hashtags and show them in an Windows 8 Modern UI app. Showing these feeds in-app works great, but I want to notify the user with a toast notification whenever a new tweet is either posted by one of the certain @Twitter users, OR when a new tweet is marked with a certain #hashtag.

From my last question, I was made aware of Azure’s role in this, and after trying to create a working notification script with snippets I’ve found so far, I’ve ended up with something which doesn’t really work:
(based on: http://webhole.net/2010/05/10/how-to-check-for-new-tweets-from-a-user/)

function insert(item, user, request) {


    var oldTweetId=0;
    var username="9gag";
    var url='http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/'+username+'.json?callback=?';
setInterval(checkStream,5000);

    function checkStream()
    {
        $.getJSON(url,function(tweets){
            if(tweets[0].id!=oldTweetId)
            {
                request.respond();
                push.wns.sendToastText04( {
                     text1: "ny tweet!"
            }, {
                success: function(pushResponse) {
                    console.log("Sent push:", pushResponse);
                }
            });
            }
        });
    }
}

Would anyone know how to actually make this work? I’ve tried a few different approaches, but to avoid unnecessary non-working code snippets, I’ll post my latest one (which doesn’t work).

Answer 1

Toast notifications can be made by your running app, or they can be pushed to a user’s device by a two-part web service. It’s not obvious to me where exactly your JS code snippet runs. Are you running that in a Node.js app on a server and calling WNS?

I would first work on getting toast notifications to work in your standalone app, not using the push service. The Windows 8 Toast notification sample in JS/C# will show you how. Once you’re happy with locally generated toast notifications, you can tackle using WNS.

The two-part web service I mentioned consists of:

1. A web service you write and host someplace to determine when to send a notification and what to say. This can be hosted in Azure or anyplace else. The obvious choice is Windows Azure Mobile Services, but you don’t have to use it.
2. The web service in part 1 communicates with the Windows Notification Service (WNS) to actually push the notification to a device.

Probably the simplest way to do push notifications from the cloud is to use Windows Azure Mobile Services. A sample by Nick Harris will show you how, but you’ll want to read up on WAMS first.