Understanding Microsoft Push Notifications for Windows Phones

The concept of push notifications (PN) is not new and is used by others in the industry. With that said, the Microsoft PN (MPN) service includes a cool twist that gives developers the power to create the impression that their application is always connected by displaying relevant information even while not running through the Live Tile displayed on the Start Screen. But before I dive into the guts of MPN, let’s explain what PNs are and why we need them.

To better understand PN, we need to remember that the end user experience is the first and foremost characteristic of Windows Phone (WP) design. A positive end-user experience is the number one WP design goal. This tenet has major implications for how WP works, not just in terms of its new UI and the interaction model it drives, but also with the application platform (the API for developers). Push notification is one obvious mechanism to ensure a coherent and deterministic end user behavior that allows you to communicate with the end user even when your phone application is not running on the phone.

"OK, all this is very nice, but why do we need PN in the first place?" you ask.

The answer is simple. The WP application model doesn’t allow you to write code that will run in the background while another application occupies the foreground (in other words, it does not allow 3rd party multitasking). But there are a growing number of “always connected application” scenarios that require background services to listen for changes and events. Come to think of it, most phone applications today have some network-related feature, whether updating scores and achievements in games, grabbing and displaying content from the cloud, or the latest trend, social applications.

Read more: Windows Phone developer blog

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