Microsoft Push Notification in Windows Phone 7

Table of Contents

• Push Notification in Windows Phone 7
• How does it benefit you?
• Tile – Notification
• Toast – Notification
• Raw – Notification
• Microsoft Push Notification Flow
• Step by Step understanding of push notification flow
• History
• My Other Posts On CodeProject

Push Notification in Windows Phone 7

The Microsoft Push Notification Service in Windows Phone offers third party developers a resilient, dedicated, and persistent channel to send information and updates to a mobile application from a web service.

In the past, a mobile application would need to frequently poll its corresponding web service to know if there are any pending notifications. While effective, polling results in the device radio were being frequently turned on, impacting battery life in a negative way. By using push notifications instead of polling, a web service can notify an application of important updates on an as-needed basis. Also please go through the MSDN link from Microsoft Push Notifications Overview for Windows Phone.

Push Notification on Windows phone 7 is one of my favorite topics, I took some time to understand. It is very simple, for quick understanding assume it is similar to the RSS Feed, here we can subscribe and receive the data when application is running/not running on Windows Phone 7.

1. WP7 Application Platform provides a set of managed APIs
2. Allow developers to directly connect applications to on-line services
3. APIs support a push model of notifications instead of polling

How Does It Benefit You?

1. Efficient battery utilization
2. Minimize memory footprint
3. Reduce processor cycles
4. Unified heartbeat reduces number of connections
5. Simple programming model on the phone
6. No persistent connection required
7. Simple to integrate with existing web 2.0 solutions.

There are 3 types of Push Notification on Windows Phone 7. They are Tile, Toast and Raw Notification.

Tile – Notification

User pins a tile to quick launch menu, cloud service updates the tile with image URI.

This is shown when the application is not running and each application will have one assigned tile for that the application should be pinned to start screen. Three elements of the tile can be updated via notification.

1. Count
2. Title
3. Background

Tiles are in 2 different sizes.

Toast – Notification

Cloud service sends a title and sub title.

This is shown when the application is not running, these will appear for a few seconds on the top of the screen and will disappear. When this notification appears, if the user taps on toast message appeared, the application will launch.

Raw – Notification

Cloud Service notifies application, if app is not running, notification is discarded.

This will be received when the application is running, if the application is not running this will not appear. Since this is raw data, this notification message can be customized and displayed to the user or it can be added to any of the UI elements accordingly. At present, this has a size limit of 1kb.

Please go through the following MSDN link for more details:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff941124(VS.92).aspx

Microsoft Push Notification Flow

Step by Step Understanding of Push Notification Flow…

1. An application which opens a channel through the push client:

   

2. The push client will return a URI to the application:

   

3. The application will pass on to your service, this is your service running on cloud somewhere.

    

4. Then you wait for some events or something to happen which needs to send notification.

   

5. Your data changed something new has arrived, as soon as the event is fired.

   

6. The service would push / send the data to the push service. This is cloud based service hosted by Microsoft, freely available to you as the developer.

   

7. Once you send this URI with data, it would send the URI and data to push client.

   

8. The push client will send data to the application, tile, or toast.

   

9. The push client and application are running in the device. Your service is what we created, Push service is the Microsoft hosted service. Both are cloud services.

   

Thank you, Enjoy Madi!

History

10^th December, 2010: Initial post

19^th December, 2010: Simplified the Step by Step flow images

My Other Posts On CodeProject

Please go through the related article from the below link:

• Windows Phone 7 – Toast Notification Using Windows Azure Cloud Service

And also please go through the 2 minutes Youtube demo:

• Toast - Microsoft Push Notification In Windows Phone 7 (WP7)

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