Search

Source: Jesse Liberty's Blog

The guiding model for the entire lifetime of an application, from launch to termination, is called the Windows Phone Execution Model. It is designed to provide a responsive system, at all times. The strategy to accomplish this is to avoid having two or more applications continuing to run in the background, competing for resources, slowing the foreground application and draining the battery.

Source: clr-namespace.com

I made a simple demo of Multitasking on Windows Phone 7 using Tombstoning. Now I get an awful lot of hits every day on the subject, so I decided to write my two cents to supplement the developer oriented post.
 
Let’s get one thing straight. Windows Phone 7 is a true multithreaded operative system. WP7 runs a User-Interface thread to ensure responsiveness even when apps are written poorly. WP7 does all network communication asynchronously. WP7 applications can utilize multiple threads and while apps are running, the underlying OS handles background tasks like notifications, messages, sensors and incoming calls. But you can’t actually RUN several applications at one time, so it’s not a true multitasking OS.

In .NET Rocks! Show number 578 about the Silverlight Pivot Viewer, a listener writes in about the lack of multitasking in Windows Phone 7.

He points out that he often uses a stopwatch on Android and let it “run in the background” while doing other tasks.

This is a perfect example of something that is entirely possible on WP7 if you try to change your mindset and look at what’s possible instead of focusing on limitations.