Question

I’d like to show a time remaining to some event on a Windows Phone live tile. The time left should be in minutes. I could live with updating every 2-5 minutes, but anything above that would render the tile nearly useless (I want to show information that gets stale fast).

I only really want to update text, but possibility to update image too would be great. Is there a way to do that in Windows Phone 7 Mango? If so, could you point me to some resources?

Answer 1

You can’t do this on the client alone, as background agents run for at most 25 15 seconds every 30 minutes.

If you setup a server component to your application, you can use push notifications to update the tile. It’s not guaranteed how quickly the phone will receive it, though, so you should test it first. It also requires the phone has connectivity.

By default, there is a limit of 500 messages that can be sent per day. However, if you secure your service with a TLS certificate and then submit that certificate to the marketplace, you can send an unlimited number of messages.