background process and UI interaction

I am working on an application that is receiving XMPP notifications using the Matrix SDK. As well I am using async web service calls to receive an initial set of data from the server.

Now, I am aware that with Mango I can close the app or move it to the background and have a background task that is able to be run every 30 mins (or so) for 15sec max which obviosuly means the XMPP push isn't going to work in this scenario. Is there any way to get background apps to execute more frequently than this?

Failing that for the syncing process all I can do is every 30 mins use a web service call to get any updates and store into Isolated storage for my app to pick up when it's next run. But I believe I cannot use any UI fro开发者_如何转开发m a background task so cannot tell the user of updates?

So, if I get an important message can I somehow override the slowness here and force my app to run and inform the user visibly that something has happened and he needs to look at it? Is this where push notifications come in?

You can use the ShellTile API to update the application's tile on the Start screen, or use the ShellToast API to show a toast to the user. Both of these can be configured to launch into a specific part of your application (deep-linking) when tapped.

If you need a constant monitoring/update/notification system for your application when it's not running, then using push notifications is probably the more appropriate approach.