Enabling quick resume for Windows Phone apps
This article explains how to quickly resume the Windows Phone 8 application which is put in the background.
See Also
Introduction
Whenever your app loses focus (is put in the background), an instance of the app is saved. This instance is used to resume the app if the user tasks to it from a deep link or returns to it by selecting the back button on the foreground app. However if the user relaunches the app by selecting its icon on the start screen, by default the stored instance is removed and it is started from scratch.
On Windows Phone 8, Fast App Resume is a way to force a relaunch to use the saved instance rather than fully restart the app. This is much faster. This is not enabled by default and you will need to enable it in order to achieve this functionality in your applications.
Enable Fast App Resume
Enabling Fast App Resume is as simple as adding one attribute to an XML element in the manifest file.
- Open WMAppManifest.xml in any editor. (I use notepad++)
- Find the element DefaultTask
- Add the attribute ActivationPolicy="Resume"
You should end up with something that looks like this:
<DefaultTask Name="_default" NavigationPage="MainPage.xaml" ActivationPolicy="Resume"/>
Croozeus - Cool tip!
Hi Sadify,
That's a nice tip, I'll give it a try.
I renamed your article so that people can find it easily. They are likely to search for words in the title.
--Pankaj.croozeus 19:57, 7 November 2012 (EET)
Hamishwillee - Show your references!
Hi
So the feature is much needed and its good for us to highlight it. However this is a fairly superficial treatment of the feature, which is much more thoroughly documented in Dev Center. I have linked to the article in a SeeAlso but probably best to add more information in the body of the article and explain the additional complexity it covers.
For the competition, we're looking for (copied from competition) - Innovative uses of new features, Real world use cases, Comprehensive tutorials. This isn't any of those really.
More generally, we try to not duplicate content already done on MSDN but instead create complementary or better articles. For example by adding an example people can try, by adding a "performance tip" that isn't captured originally, by gathering information spread across a number of articles into one comprehensive article, by showing a cool use of a technology that others might not have thought of.
Regards
Hamishhamishwillee 06:54, 8 November 2012 (EET)