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Tip The tile and badge updaters are very sensitive to properly formed XML. In the PHP code above,
leaving off the closing / for the badge element will make the update fail to appear. Avoiding such trivial
errors is again why the Notifications Extensions Library was created, at least for ASP.NET. I’m hoping
that some enterprising reader might consider a similar project for PHP and other server-side languages!
Going back to the Windows Developer Blog post mentioned earlier, I want to point out that the
ASP.NET example given there—the one that begins with @{—is using the ASP.NET Razor syntax
(typically in a .cshtml file), introduced with Microsoft WebMatrix. Razor/WebMatrix, along with tools
such as Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web and a whole lot else, can be installed through the Web
platform installer. To familiarize yourself with Razor, which works much in the same way as PHP, start
with Walkthrough: Creating a Web Site using Razor Syntax in Visual Studio.
To make that long story short, here are the steps in Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web to create a
simple tile update service based on the Razor code in the blog post:
• Select File > New Web Site from the menu.
• In the New Web Site dialog, select ASP.NET Web Site (Razor v1), give it a project name and
folder, and press OK. Call this site HelloTiles.
• Once the project is created, you should see the Default.cshtml file opened.
• Copy and paste the following Razor code into that file, replacing the default contents. The little
piece of C# code at the top for the weekDay variable is something we’ll use in the next section to
demonstrate debugging; it’s not used in generating the XML. Here, note that I tested and
generated the XML contents by using the tile designer in Scenario 5 of the App tiles and badges
sample (see Figure 13-15); this saved me lots of time wondering whether my XML was correct.
@{
//
// This is where any other code would be placed to acquire the dynamic content
// needed for the tile update. In this case we'll just return static XML to show
// the structure of the service itself.
//
var weekDay = DateTime.Now.DayOfWeek;
}
Liam--
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