Silverlight Show: Windows 8 and the future of XAML Part 7: The application lifecycle of Windows 8 applications

In the previous articles of this series, we have touched on quite a few important aspects of Windows 8 application development. In part 6, we looked at tiles. We saw that live tiles are a way of allowing your application to displaying up-to-date information to the end-user while it’s not running. A valid question that I often get is: why isn’t the application running? We’ve had the multi-tasking paradigm for many years now and it’s something we as developers take for granted.

Windows 8 breaks with this “tradition”: a new type of application lifecycle is introduced in Windows 8, entirely managed by the operating system itself. However, it has several places where we as developers need to hook into to build great experiences for our users.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the options we have to manage how our application behaves in combination with the new application lifecycle management. We’ll take a look at executing code in the background as well.

The code for this article can be downloaded here.

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