To wrap up this Q&A series and following from yesterday’s Live Tiles Q&A, I have a few more specifically related to toasts. Do note that half of yesterday’s post applies to tiles and toasts equally, specifically those parts related to WNS.


Question: Do scheduled toasts work in Connected Standby mode?

Answer: Yes. Typically an app that wants this behavior also needs to be lock screen-capable, and the user will need to add that app to their list of lock screen apps through PC Settings.


Question: Is it possible to set the background color of the toast to be different from apps default background color?

Answer: No, the toast background color is tied to the app’s tile background color. This is an aspect of branding so that users can visually see where the notification is coming from. This is one reason why apps cannot access the current system color scheme, otherwise they’d be able to spoof system notifications.


Question: I’ve found that is my server sends more than 7 toast notifications only the first 7 will actually appear. Is this a known limitation? Can it be modified on a per app basis?

Answer: Only three toasts can be displayed on the screen at once, and there is a fixed limit on the number of toasts that will be queued for later display. These are per-user limits, shared between apps. An app cannot increase it’s own limit. If there is need to show more information from an app, consider aggregating those notifications such that fewer needs to be send.


Question: Can I configure locally-issued toasts to only appear when my app is in the background?

Answer: Not directly, as the toast API doesn’t have such an option. You’ll need to monitor your app’s visibility state directly and suppress notifications when you’re visible.


Question: Is it possible for a desktop app (full trust) to suppress notifications like the user can do through PC Settings?

Answer: Toast Notifications will be dropped if the QUNS state is QUNS_PRESENTATION_MODE or QUNS_RUNNING_D3D_FULL_SCREEN. See

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