NFC tags with Windows Phone 8

Today I have ordered my first NFC tags to try this amazing new technology which comes with Windows Phone 8. To get started I found some very good websites  which explains the NFC technology and contains several samples for writing and reading NFC tags.

If you plan to work with NFC tags consider the following points. Especially if you order NFC tags, check if they support the NDEF standard and the tags are already formatted.

• You cannot enable the write lock.
• You cannot format a tag. Your tag must be formatted for NDEF message.
• Your tag can contain only an NDEF message.
• You cannot use all tag memory. NDEF formatting data and other private tag data take memory. Because of the fact that a tag has only a few bytes of memory, this data size is important. For example, you can only write 716 bytes on a tag with a memory of 1024 bytes and 454 bytes on a tag with a memory of 512 bytes.
• Proximity API does not give tools to manipulate directly NDEF messages. To manipulate raw NDEF messages you can use NDEF Library for Proximity APIs (NFC).
• You cannot receive or write a tag when your application runs in background.

Detail information about NFC on Windows Phone 8 you could found here:

• Entry page for using NFC tags with Windows Phone 8 on Nokia developer Wiki
• Microsoft documentation about the Proximity API
• Common page of the Nokia developer Wiki about NFC technology
• Comparison about supported NFC technologies on the different platforms – NFC support on Windows Phone 8
• NDEF Open source library to read and write NDEF formatted NFC messages on Windows Phone 8