Windows 8 Application Development with HTML5 For Dummies

Chapter 11

Managing the Process Lifecycle

In This Chapter

Determining when Windows Store apps run and don’t run

Creating seamless application experiences

Making your app faster and more fluid

Process lifecycle management (or PLM) is a large, complex, technical, and sometimes controversial topic that isn’t the usual fodder for a For Dummies book. It’s a bunch of stuff that you have to know to improve the user experience for your app, but it doesn’t have a tremendous amount of extremely visible outcomes.

It’s just something you have to do.

In short, Windows Store apps run like phone apps, not like Windows 7 or web programs. In the Windows world, apps run until the user stops them. In the web world, apps run when the user requests something and then immediately forget the user ever existed.

Windows Store apps are somewhere in between. They have status as long as they are visible, and then they might lose their status with the operating system, or they might not. They’re like the Schrödinger’s cat of the programming world. (You know, the act of checking on it determines its existence.)

Nonetheless, you have to always be prepared for the operating system to forget about your app. The ...