I have a regular Windows API (not metro) application that I would like to have a live (periodically updating) Start Menu tile on Windows 8, instead of a static start menu shortcut.
I tried to navigate the MSDN maze related to this topic, but it appears to come with the assumption that I'm building a Metro app. I don't need a Metro application, I just would like to push some information into a tile that when clicked will still execute my regular WinApi application.
If these APIs are not available in WinAPI, what is the smallest "glue" that can be used for this purpose? E.g. can I have some minimal HTML + Javascript Metro component that will access my application via COM and just craft the needed text + images for the tile?
Desktop applications can not have live tiles, and afaik there's no way for a metro app to talk directly to a desktop one. You could implement a minimal HTTP server in your desktop app and then write a metro app that gets data via that and updates the tile.