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Source: UK Premier Support for Developers

I’m currently prepping for my TechEd Europe WP7 session and I like to prepare for the worst. My demo relies on some cloud services and also on WP7 push notifications. Push notifications are nice but they have one drawback for demos, I need an internet connection.

When I started digging into the WP7 push notification system I thought it would be pretty quick to learn.  On the surface it’s not terribly complicated. My phone app tells a service that it wants to receive notifications and the service sends them. In the end, it pretty much is that simple. Getting there, however, was more difficult then it needed to be. This is mainly due to the beta nature of WP7. Working on beta platforms shows how poorly the web handles finding the most relevant information. There are lots of articles out there that explain the messaging system.  I’m sure I could look harder, but the few samples and demos that I reviewed didn’t work out of the gate. I had to review several and piece together information from different sources to get a working demo.

Windows Phone 7 application can’t run in the background (performance, battery life, usage of radio) and therefore there is a need to have a mechanism that facilitates a communication channel between backend services and application on the phone. Push Notification is the mechanism through which backend services can send “messages” to the phone to notify the user for any state changes. The Push Notification service is designed to provide a cloud service with a dedicated, resilient, and persistent channel for pushing a notification to a mobile device.