Passing data between Windows 10 IoT Core headed and headless apps

As shown in my last blog, Windows 10 IoT Core supports headed and headless apps. I can run only one headed (UWP) app at a time but running multiple headless apps is possible too.

But how do I deploy these apps? And can I pass information between apps while running?

In this blog, we dive deeper into the unseen world of background application.

Building a Windows 10 IoT Core background webserver

The RaspberryPi is running the core of Windows 10. This means that everything, not needed for running one app at a time, is left out of Windows 10. And with one app I mean, one visual app.

Until now I have always build a Windows UWP app to run something on the RaspberryPi.  And the fact it has a form which can represent visual elements in XAML, it gives away that it is a visual app. These kind of apps are running in headed mode.

But running one visual app, taking the whole screen occupied in headed mode, does not prevent the OS from running multiple background processes in headless mode.

Today we will build our first simple web server on the Raspberry Pi running Windows 10 IoT Core.