Question

I’ve been developing Windows desktop applications for many years, but just started developing Windows Phone 8 applications so, as you can imagine, I have many questions and doubts.

This is my problem so far:

I need an application to check any certain time if there are new messages / notifications in the server database, even if the application is not running, and show it (in some way, not sure how) on the phone. At the end, I want something similar to Facebook application (or others) that checks constantly if there are new messages even if I’m not using the phone.
How can I do that? Is there any tutorial or guide that explains that?

Thank you very much

Answer 1

There’s two mechanisms available on Windows Phone to periodically check a data source and display notifications:

1. Push notifications: the server directly sends the notification to the phone. It provides the best user experience, because the notification is send (nearly) instantaneously, and because all the processing is done server-side (so it doesn’t impact the phone’s autonomy). The obvious drawback is that you need a server infrastructure to send the notifications.

2. Background agents: your application runs in background, is woke up periodically (every 30 minutes or so), and is allowed to run for about 15 seconds. During those 15 seconds, you can check your data source, and display a notification if needed. The two major drawbacks are that you can’t choose when you’re background agent executes (so the notification can be displayed 30 minutes late), and it’ll have an impact on the battery life.