Welcome to part 6 already in this Windows 8 series. Since the goal of this articles is bringing you in touch with all the important aspects of Windows 8 development, we need to dive into tiles.

Tiles are therefore the main topic of this very article. If you’re coming from a Windows Phone 7 background, the concept of tiles is probably already familiar to you. However, Windows 8 brings quite a few new things to the table, including the concept of badges. Toasts are also covered here; conceptually, these already existed in Windows Phone 7 development as well but have been adapted for use in a Windows 8 environment.

The concepts of tiles

In Windows 8, due to the new way application lifetime management, only one application can be running at any point in time (except when the user has two applications side-by-side using snap view; in that case, two applications are running at the same time).

If not running, the application is suspended. We’ll cover the lifetime management in a coming article.

Read more…