Beginning Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Windows® Phone Applications Using Silverlight® and XNA®

10

Web Services Push Notifications

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Understanding how push service architecture works
• Understanding participant requirements for push services
• Understanding the difference between toast, tile, and raw push notifications
• Configuring a push notification channel
• Sending and receiving push notification messages

In the previous two chapters, you learned how to access web services from Windows Phone 7 applications, both through helper classes and directly. You also learned about the protocols used to communicate with web services and how to create simple Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services for yourself. Push notifications take web services to a new level. With a push notification, you don't have to write code to call a web service operation. Instead, a push notification involves a web service talking to your application without prompting. It can even work when your application isn't running.

You've probably come across many applications that support push notifications without really knowing it. Some examples are email, social media applications that tell you your friends' updates, and all kinds of other applications that provide notifications, from shopping to music. Not all applications want or require push notification functionality, of course, but many do. Having these notifications at your disposal provides a lot of power.

In this chapter, you'll learn how push notifications work in Windows Phone 7 devices, what types of notifications ...