Read original post at Michiel Post's Blog
A really common scenario in a Windows 8 / WinRT app (or any app) is to load data from the web or do some other action that takes a while to complete. While loading our data, we also have to update the UI to show some sort of loader so the user knows a bunch of data is being loaded.
With Windows 8 and the Async / Task model it's really easy to do asynchronous task on another thread and not block the UI. But how do we show the user what's going on with the long running task?