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

SUMMARY

In this chapter, you've seen how to send and receive push notifications in Windows Phone 7 applications. To start, you learned how the push notification architecture works and what participants are required for it to hold together. Next, you looked at what's involved in preparing for push notifications by registering with the central notification service. You learned about notification channels, and you learned that you must create or find a channel and then register a channel URI with a service in order to send notifications.

Next, you learned about the three types of notifications — toast, tile, and raw. In particular, you learned that best-practice use for notifications is generally to use them sparingly, especially when it comes to intrusive toast notifications, which interrupt the user.

After learning about the architecture, you moved on to implement a push notification system. You built a Windows Phone 7 application consumer and a REST service to send push notifications. You saw how simple it can be to send notifications and how useful these notifications can be.

There is, of course, more that you can do. It's possible to include callbacks in secured push services so that you can detect when a device goes offline, for example. You've seen all the essentials, but when it comes to actually using push notifications, you're limited only by your imagination. You can expect to see innovative uses of push notifications in the years to come. This technology is still relatively ...