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I have a live tile working which updates how many users are online and how many lobbies are open within the app. This begins updating when my app loses its visibility (no point it updating the live tile whilst the app is running), but I want it to update when I first turn the computer on.

I have had a look around and mentions of making the app a lock screen app have popped up but that is all, no explanation how to do it.

Does anyone know how to do this and provide a nice little explanation or link of how to do so?

Many thanks, Kevin

Kevin Orriss
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2 Answers2

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You're right with the assumption that you require a lock screen capability to be able to run background tasks without your app being started once. The main process would be to extract the part of your application that gets the data into a background task that is probably triggered by a timer and write some code to be on the lock screen.

When I first encountered that restriction I was kind of surprised, but in terms of battery performance this design decision makes sense: Only consume battery power if the data is absolutely worth it. If it's worth, it is also of interest having it on the lock screen.

On MSDN is a good overview about lock screen along with further reading links. It's much better than what I could type in here. Come back with problems related the implementation (which actually even better fits the purpose of SO). This blog might be useful, too.

Sascha
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You should use push notifications for this kind of behaviour. This msdn link has more info:-

Using tile notifications Choosing the right notification method to update your tile There are several mechanisms which can be used to update a live tile: Local API calls One-time scheduled notifications, using local content Push notifications, sent from a cloud server Periodic notifications, which pull information from a cloud server at a fixed time interval The choice of which mechanism to use largely depends on the content you want to show and how frequently that content should be updated. The majority of apps will probably use a local API call to update the tile when the app is launched or the state changes within the app. This makes sure that the tile is up-to-date when it launches and exits. The choice of using local, push, scheduled, or polling notifications, alone or in some combination, completely depends upon the app. For example, a game can use local API calls to update the tile when a new high score is reached by the player. At the same time, that same game app could use push notifications to send that same user new high scores achieved by their friends.

Ross Dargan
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