Windows 8 Notifications: Periodic Notifications

My loose description of periodic (and push) notifications as ‘external’ or ‘decoupled’ is rooted in the observation that content delivered via periodic and push notifications is not typically initiated or provided by the Windows 8 application itself.

With periodic notifications, the Windows 8 application is a subscriber to content hosted at a URI that specifies the XML template for the tile or badge notification (toast is not supported for periodic notifications). Whatever content is at that URI at the regularly recurring time (from 30 minutes to daily) is what the Windows 8 application will use. It’s up to some 3rd party service or application to update that URI’s content at the appropriate interval - providing information on the daily special at a given restaurant, for example.

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Windows 8 XAML Tips - Settings Demo

In my previous blog post I explained how you can use the PaneThemeTransition from the Animation Library to show a task pane. In this blog post I want to use this technique to open my Settings and About task panes from the Settings Charm. I will try to make it easier by introducing a TaskPanePopup helper class.

TaskPanePopup

You construct an instance of the TaskPanePopup class using a task pane, in most cases this will be a user control. In the constructor a Popup control is created and initialized with the Child (the task pane) and the ChildTransitions (PaneThemeTransition coming from the right). The Width of the task pane must be set to calculate the position of the Popup. The task pane will be shown in a Popup using the animation when you call the Show() method on the instance.

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Windows 8 XAML Tips - Show a task pane

You can integrate the look and feel introduced in Windows 8 Release Preview into your Metro style app by using the Animation Library suite of Windows-provided animations. Use of the Animation Library animations provides these benefits:

• Motions that align to Metro style animation principles
• Fast, fluid transitions between UI states that inform but do not distract the user
• Clearer visuals to show the user transitions within an app

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Exporting SQL Server Compact to SQLite

The current available local relational database storage options on WinRT (Windows 8) are limited to SQLite (and maybe some others). Also on Windows Phone 8, both SQL Server Compact and SQLite will be available. So a natural path solutions currently based on SQL Server Compact will be to migrate to SQLite, and the first step would be to move the schema and data to a SQLite database.

I have therefore “bitten the bullet”, and the next version of the SQL Server Compact Toolbox,currently available for download in an alpha version, includes a feature to “dump” a SQL Server Compact database in SQLite .dump format.

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