Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/27/build-2013-sessionndashalive-with-activity.aspx

Live tiles are what really add a ton of value to both Windows 8 and Windows Phone.  As a developer it is important that you leverage this capability in order to make your apps more informative and give your users a reason to keep opening the app to find out details hinted at by tile updates.

In this session Kraig Brockschmidt cover a wide array of dos and don’ts for implementing live tiles.  I was actually worried whether I would get much out of this session when Kraig started it off with the fact that his background is in HTML5 based apps which I have little interest in, but the subject almost didn’t come up during his talk.  It focused on things like making sure you have all the right size graphics and implementing all of the tile event handlers.  The session went on to discuss the message format for push notification and implementing lock screen notification and badges.

As with the other day 1 sessions it was like drinking from a fire hose, but it was good stuff.  Check it out when they post it on Channel 9.