title: Windows Phone 8 notifications and background tasks
body: <p>I have searched the official forums and documentation and all other places, but haven't been able to find a concrete answer.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Q. In Windows Phone 8, is it possible for an application to respond to a Push Notification, and perform a task, while it is in the background?</strong></p>
  
  <p>As far as I can understand, for <strong>Toast and Tile Notifications</strong>, when the app is not in the foreground, there are no hooks at all for it to be able to respond to the incoming message.</p>
  
  <p>I think <strong>"raw notifications"</strong> are the correct choice for this, since I am not required to update the app tile, or even show a Toast Notification. But, I haven't been able to find an example, or in the documentations, if I can do this.</p>
  
  <p>I have found several links which talk about doing this for <strong>Windows store apps</strong>, but I want to find out if this can be done for <strong>Windows Phone 8</strong>.</p>
  
  <p>I have checked this other thread, </p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16864633/windows-phone-8-background-task-with-notifications">Windows Phone 8 Background Task with notifications</a></p>
  
  <p>Where one of the answer suggests that <strong>Whatsapp</strong> actually has a hack for this, to download the messages after a push notification is received. So, is the answer to my question, a <strong>NO</strong>?</p>