Workflow notification application for Windows

Phone 8 (WNAP)Students: Ilya Paskhover, Alex TarasiukSupervisors: Simon Zeltser, Idan Sheinberg

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Notifications:◦ Toast - a transient message to the user that can appear

whether you are in another app, the start or lock screen.◦ Tile – a message to an interactive application icon (tile).◦ Raw – a non visual data message with maximum size of 1kb.

MPNS - Microsoft Push Notification Service Azure Mobile Service – a cloud computing platform and

infrastructure, created by Microsoft, for building, deploying and managing applications and services.

Workflow – a cloud service deployment containing several steps.

Definitions

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Develop a workflow notification application for Windows Phone 8. The application will contact the ‘report-progress service’ and provide the required details about user’s workflows progress.

Goals

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Application flow

DB

Azure

App

Authenticate user

Available users request

Verification

Inner user name

Toast notification

Tile notification

Raw notification

Data request

User workflows

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Methodology (App. screens)

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DEMO

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User connection to the server is made by Microsoft account.

Download all necessary data and displaying it on the screen.

User Microsoft account -> Inner user name -> Environment ID -> Scenario IDs -> Step IDs.

The DS holds more ‘informed’ Steps and Scenarios.

Methodology

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Implementing a large part of the server side (DB, scripts, connection..).

The maintenance of the local DS made by using Raw notifications.

Each notification carry information about an update which occurred in the DB.

We use JSON format (JavaScript Object Notation) for the notification structure.

We built a parser for Raw notifications. User experience testing for the GUI.

Methodology

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C# WP8 SDK XAML Windows Azure Mobile Service MPNS JavaScript JSON

Used technologies

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Until midway meeting:Definition of application requirements.Data structure design.Definition of application screens.Receive informative notifications (tile and toast).

From midway meeting:Improve basic server in Mobile Azure Service (including DB, notification server and others).Update local data with notifications (raw).Complete authorization process for data security.Improve user experience with GUI.Manage SVN repository during the development.Documentation.

Achievements

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Working application. Source code. Code documentation. User manual. Developer manual.

Deliverables

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Windows Phone 8 SDK and Windows Azure documentation/help is very limited on MSDN and Stackoverflow, so we used online books and lectures for the development.

Some basic GUI parts are already implemented and available for free using – Windows Phone Toolkit, Application Bar, Pivot Template. So we could spend more time on other things.

More frequent meetings could improve understanding the project requirements and adjusting the implementation accordingly.

Conclusions