Question

I want to update my Secondary Tiles via a Background Task. My problem is, that iterating through all pinned tiles with SecondaryTile.FindAllAsync(); fails and exits my Background Task with code 1.

I have no idea, why it is not possible to do that, why I don’t get any exceptions and why this works within the main app. Could this be a memory problem?

My code looks like this:

public sealed class SecondaryTileUpdater : IBackgroundTask
{
    public async void Run(IBackgroundTaskInstance taskInstance)
    {
        var list = await SecondaryTile.FindAllAsync(); // Here it fails :(
        foreach (SecondaryTile liveTile in list)
        {
            // Update Secondary Tiles
            // (...)
        }
    }
}

This is the error I get:

The program '[5644] backgroundTaskHost.exe: Managed (v4.0.30319)' has exited with code 1 (0x1).

Any ideas, what could be reasons for this?
Thank you for any help!

Answer 1

Once your async method awaits, your task is ending. Request a deferral to give your asynchronous code time to execute.

public sealed class SecondaryTileUpdater : IBackgroundTask
{
    public async void Run(IBackgroundTaskInstance taskInstance)
    {
        //HERE: request a deferral
        var deferral = taskInstance.GetDeferral();

        var list = await SecondaryTile.FindAllAsync(); // Here it fails :(
        foreach (SecondaryTile liveTile in list)
        {
            // Update Secondary Tiles
            // (...)
        }

        //HERE: indicate you are done with your async operations
        deferral.Complete();
    }
}