Creating Notifications in the "Tidy" application

Scheduling notifications that trigger even when your application is not in the foreground is a critical multi-tasking task for applications such as alarm clocks and calendars. This lab uses the new ScheduledActionService to create and manage reminders and alarms for a task management application. The application will also demonstrate how deep linking works when the user clicks on a reminder and that launches your application to an actionable page with context from the reminder.

Overview

Some Windows® Phone applications need to schedule notifications for the user; the typical scenarios here are an alarm or a reminder for an upcoming event.

One of the many new features of Windows Phone Codenamed Mango is the ability to schedule a notification. There are two types of scheduled notifications: Alarm and Reminder. An alarm allows you to specify a sound when the notification fires, and a reminder allows you to specify a URI that will be actionable when the user clicks on the Reminder. This means, for example, that if the reminder is for a meeting, the URI can be a deep link to this meeting. When the user clicks the reminder, your application launches and navigates the user to the page the URI specified in the reminder.

This lab shows how to add alarms and reminders to your application using the new Windows Phone Codenamed Mango API.

Objectives

This lab provides instructions to help you achieve the following:

• Add reminders and alarms to your Windows Phone application

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites are required for you to gain the most you can from this hands-on lab:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 or Microsoft Visual C# Express 2010, and the Windows® Phone Developer Tools available at https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9772716
• Knowledge regarding application development for the Windows Phone 7

Lab Structure

This lab includes a single exercise. The following tasks are contained in the exercise:

1. Adding support for notification management
2. Managing reminders and alarms through the user interface

Estimated completion time

Completing this lab should take from 30 to 45 minutes.