Windows 8 operating system is expected to be launched in Q3 2012 and after the Developer Preview release there’s been a lot of work going on in the Windows 8 Development front.One of the most important issues is the Battery Life of the Devices on which Windows 8 would run,specifically the Tablets and the Laptops running on battery.
Windows 8 will feature the Metro UI which is inspired from the Windows Phones and like the Windows Phones the Metro UI on the Windows 8 will feature the live tiles concept.In a blog post on Building Windows 8 blog they detailed the work they have done so far to optimize the performance of the live tiles and reduce the battery consumption of the devices.
So here are the goals for the notification platform:
■ Allow hundreds of live tiles without degrading performance
■ Go beyond balloons, badges and text, with beautiful images
■ Make it easy for developers so they can just “fire and forget”
■ Achieve real-time delivery so delivering “instant messages” is instant
In order to achieve these goals Microsoft aims to take the data driven approach so that no app code is running in the background to power the Start screen while still delivering live content, which will eventually result in power savings and better performance for the system.
Here’s how they intend to do that,
Our solution was to build a data-driven model. This means that a developer can express their tile using a set of predefined properties and templates, in this case, using an XML schema. The XML tile data is then sent to the Windows Push Notification Service (WNS) via a simple HTTP POST and then we take care of the rest. All the code for connecting, retrying, authentication, caching, rendering, error handling, etc. is done in a uniform and power-efficient way.
Talking about the Push notifications platform,push notification would overcome the disadvantage of polling system which requires frequent access to start screen and which would’ve consumed more battery power.
Here are the details of the Push Notifications:
1.
Windows Push Notification Service (WNS): This powers live tiles and toast notifications.
2.
App service: This is the web service that a Metro style app runs (e.g. from their existing website), which sends toast notifications and tile updates via WNS. Examples of this would be the back-end service for the Weather app that shipped in the Developer Preview, or a back-end service hosting photos for a social networking app.
3.
Windows 8 client platform: This represents the actual PC and the sub-components in the OS that form the plumbing for the end-to-end experience.
The new Task Manager would also feature the Tile resource usage (the bandwidth consumed by each tile is visible through the task manager).As you can see from the below image the last tiles column shows the bandwidth usage of specific tiles being used.
In the security front for preventing all sorts of malicious attacks Microsoft’s anonymous authentication mechanism will create unique responses between the Windows 8 machine and the WNS. This mechanism will integrate apps and live tile services together so that no other applications can interfere and maliciously update the live tiles.
