I’ve been working on a Windows Phone 8.1 project which has several background tasks. One of these uses the device’s sensors – using a DeviceUseTrigger. This is different to how a regular periodic task works because the task implementation creates a deferral and keeps running handling the event generated by the sensor device until it is explicitly cancelled. The task is created normally with a class implementing IBackgroundTask and runs under the context of BackgroundTaskHost.exe. Because I wanted to share some data with the other tasks as a when they run I was interested if these other IBackgroundTask implementations were also hosted in the same process. If so this means that any static instances would be shared between them. Since I couldn’t find the answer I did some testing with some additional debugging and discovered that no, they each run in a separate process.
This lead me to explore how to share data between them. There are no built in IPC classes in the Windows Runtime like MessageQueues or similar so really the only options are the LocalSettings for individual setting values and files placed in the LocalFolder for any other data. The added complication here is that you have to handle the situation where both processes may try to read/write the file at the same time. Luckily you can use a named Mutex to enforce exclusive access to the file and have the other process wait on the Mutex.
In The Hand Ltd 