Reading up on background agents in Windows Phone. All guides say I should start with creating a new project specifically for the agent. Is that a requirement? Cite place.
The bigger question is - how does the framework find the class that implements the scheduled task? AFAIK, starting a background task involves calling ScheduledActionService.Add() passing a ScheduledAction-derived object as a parameter. Nowhere in here can I see any pointer to the identity of task's implementation. Neither are tasks registered in the manifest.
Neither are tasks registered in the manifest.
They are. See the "BackgroundServiceAgent" element in your manifest file: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/ff769509(v=vs.105).aspx
In the end, I don't know if creating a separate project is a requirement. By manually adding the line in the manifest and pointing to a class in the main project, I don't see what could technically prevent the background agent from working. I haven't tried though. Still, putting the background agent in a separate assembly can be convenient: the memory limit for agents is ridiculously low, so not having to load the main project and its dependencies can probably save a few hundreds KB of memory