Using Live SDK in Windows 8 – C#

Live SDK provides a set of controls and APIs that enable applications to integrate single sign-on (SSO) with Microsoft accounts and access information from SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Windows Live Messenger on Windows Phone and Windows 8.

Live SDK support several platforms such as: iOS, Android and of course Windows Phone and Windows 8 applications using C# and JS.

In this demo I’ll show how to use Live SDK with Windows 8

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Integrating your cloud service with the file picker contracts

In the past, users organized, shared, and maintained their documents, photos, videos, and music on the local PC. But the cloud is quickly providing users with much richer ways to access, experience, and manage the files they care about. Windows 8 embraces these new scenarios by allowing you to deeply integrate cloud services directly into your apps to create completely new experiences that were not possible before.

You can see many of these scenarios highlighted in the SkyDrive app which uses the file picker contracts. The file picker contracts are designed to make user’s documents, photos, videos, & music stored in your app available to all other Windows 8 apps. In this post, we use the SkyDrive app (which implements all three of the file picker contracts as introduced in Connecting your apps, files, PCs and devices to the cloud with SkyDrive and Windows 8) to show you:

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Consuming the Amazon S3 service from a Win8 Metro Application

As many of the existing Http APIs for Cloud Services, AWS also provides a set of different platform SDKs for hiding many of complexities present in the APIs. While there is a platform SDK for .NET, which is open source and available in C#, that SDK does not work in Win8 Metro Applications for the changes introduced in WinRT. WinRT offers a complete different set of APIs for doing I/O operations such as doing http calls or using cryptography for signing or encrypting data, two aspects that are absolutely necessary for consuming AWS. All the I/O APIs available as part of WinRT are asynchronous, and uses the TPL model for .NET applications (HTML and JavaScript Metro applications use a model based in promises, which is similar concept).

In the case of S3, the http Authorization header is used for two purposes, authenticating clients and make sure the messages were not altered while they were in transit. For doing that, it uses a signature or hash of the message content and some of the headers using a symmetric key (That's just one of the available mechanisms). Windows Azure for example also uses the same mechanism in many of its APIs.

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Metro Applications - FAQ

With the advent of Microsoft Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Office 2013, Microsoft is now all about Metro UI and Metro Apps. And when Windows 8 will be released, everybody will be developing or talking about Metro apps. But what is a Metro app and how to build these apps? There are many questions in the mind of many developers. Let’s just find answers for few of them in this blog post. 

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Why MetroOAuth or C# Async makes life easier

Yesterday, I finally pushed some of the OAuth libraries I have been tinkering with. I have a really nice and simple library (and this simplicity seems to flow throughout the library). I decided to pull out some examples using my DropboxClient to show how much simpler a library can be.

Here’s how you log in to Dropbox (in c#):

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Poll: Is your company(or you) moving into #winRT development or are sticking with #silverlight & #WPF for now. #wpdev #win8dev

Poll: Is your company(or you) moving into #winRT development or are sticking with #silverlight & #WPF for now. #wpdev #win8dev

Submit your poll here

What Windows 8 Developers Should Know About The Cloud

Successful Application = Windows 8 + Cloud

 

 

1. Client-side developers do need to embrace the cloud. The increasing popularity of connected devices like tablet computers and smartphones is having a direct effect on the adoption rate of personal cloud services. You can expect both connected devices and cloud services to grow together.
2. This trend has been accelerating over the past couple of years. Mobile and portable devices have limited internal storage and rely heavily on cloud services.
3. Windows 8 apps are generally Connected apps.
4. You can pull data to them or you can receive push notifications

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