What is Tombstoning in WP7?

Question

I have seen the word Tombstoning in many tutorials. I did not get what it actually means. Can you please explain?

Answer 1

The procedure in which the operating system terminates an application’s process when the user navigates away from the application [is] called tombstone or tombstoning. The operating system maintains information about the application’s last state, that is, its last viewed page and the navigation journal. If the user navigates back to the application, the operating system restarts the application process and passes the state data back to the application.

Ref.

Answer 2

What Mitch referenced is a good example. A more app-driven example would be something like:

you have a 'Calendar' style app that users can enter their calendar into. Suppose while adding a new Calendar entry at the add-event page, the user recieves an email, and presses the Windows key to quickly view it.

Then, To navigate back to the app, presses the Back key, which, instead of opening the application, opens to the add-event page, where the user left off.

Check App.xaml for

private void Application_Activated(object sender, ActivatedEventArgs e)

and

private void Application_Deactivated(object sender, ActivatedEventArgs e)

, the two functions that happen when the application awakes from Tombstoning, and is about to Tombstone.

Answer 3

There's a video tutorial of tombstoning at http://www.dimecasts.net/Content/WatchEpisode/185 that you may want to watch