Chapter 22. App settings and suspend/resume
This chapter covers
- Creating an app settings UI
- Using the ApplicationData class
- Using app settings
- Handling app suspend and resume
As we near the end of this book, there are a few important topics to cover that most app developers address later in their app development cycle. The first is the persistent storage of application settings. Most apps have some sort of secondary data, typically configuration information that they need to save. Windows 8 provides not only standardized classes for storing and retrieving this data but also a standardized approach to the UI for entering this data.
The second important topic is managing the app’s lifetime. Many apps get away without ever dealing with app suspend and resume, but the experience just isn’t that great when developers skip this. An app that suspends and then comes back looking like a brand-new launch, all because the user flicked over to the mail app for a second, is unlikely to be used very often.
Together, both of these will round out the knowledge you require to wrap up the code and UI for your app. These little details may seem unimportant compared to the rest of the app functionality, but given the broad (and often unforgiving) audience made available through the Windows Store, even the smallest detail can make or break an app.