Alive with activity: Tiles, notifications, and background tasks

"Using Windows 8," as one commentator has written, "is like living in a house made out of Internet." The innovative Start screen of Windows 8 is alive with tiles that bring key information from apps into a unified view. Other notifications keep users informed and engaged, even when apps aren't running at all. In this talk we'll see the basics of notifications, as well as how to create web services for tile updates and how to work with the Windows Push Notification Service.