What’s changed for app developers since //build/ (part 2)

As promised, I’m back to tell you about more of the important work that we’ve done since //build/. In part 1 of this post, I covered DirectX and XAML integration, improvements to the Blend designers, CSS independent animations, and more. But I’m sure you’re eager to dig into more of what’s new, so let’s jump right in.

Tile and toast notifications

Tiles and toasts are key parts of our Metro style design principles. They allow you to see important info at a glance, even when your app isn’t running. We received a lot of feedback from you about the tile and toast notifications development experience – a large portion of that feedback was centered on creating and updating tiles. In response to this we improved the tile experience in 3 ways:

1. We introduced polling APIs to update tiles. You can use the new periodic tile notification API to tell Windows to poll your cloud service for tile content specific to your app. This is the easiest way to keep your app’s tile alive with activity using content from the web. The JavaScript snippet here shows how to start polling for your app’s tile: 

// update the tile with a poll URL

var polledUri = new Windows.Foundation.Uri("http://www.fabrikam.com/tile.xml");

var recurrence = Windows.UI.Notifications.PeriodicUpdateRecurrence.halfHour;

var tileUpdater = Windows.UI.Notifications.TileUpdateManager.createTileUpdaterForApplication();

tileUpdater.startPeriodicUpdate(polledUri, recurrence);

The content returned from your web service must conform to the tile XML schema. Note that tile badges can also be updated via polling.

For more info on updating your tile check out these links on the Dev Center: 

Adding polling tiles

Push and periodic notifications client-side sample

Choosing a notification delivery method

1. We made it easier to create beautiful tile and toast content.

Read more: Windows 8 app developer blog

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