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Comment by ricg | Hacker News Reader

Another huge pain point of UWP: the whole suspend/resume concept.

UWP apps can't be closed by the user. The system manages the lifecycle and there's no way for a developer to know when the app will be terminated and when to save data.

To save your app's data you have to:

- Register for a suspend event

- Ask for an extended execution so that your app is not terminated within a few seconds

- Save your data and cross your fingers that the system does not terminate your app anyway and your data is lost

I recently ported a document-based macOS app to UWP and this was the BIGGEST pain point (aside from the fact that there's no easy way for an app to have more than one window, ouch).

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This does force a particular design pattern which is very nice when it works but very painful to retrofit - incremental save.

You are absolutely right, and I work with users who would fire someone in the dev team if their WPF app ever went down during the week (the app is kept running for 5 days of the week). This is necessary for many trading platforms

It's worse when your app requires to maintain a constant connection to a server in order to function - when the app suspends good luck knowing when that connection will be closed, even with an extended execution!

An application can never trust that the connection is reliable. When the app suspends, it is too late to use network. You should shut down as if you were offline.

Well, that can be sorted out with a background task.

Even with a background task your app can be terminated by the system without further notice after the suspend event (e.g. when the user powers off the device). There's no orderly fashion in which an app can be terminated and save its data.

The suspended even is the orderly fashion to save the data.

An ExtendedExecutionSession with a SavingData reason, should be more than enough for any kind of data.

Thank you. I was wondering if someone was going to mention this.

If the application loses user data when forcibly terminated, it is likely not worth using anyway.

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