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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No more SkyDrive file type restrictions

As more and more developers have been building Windows 8 apps, they've appreciated the Windows 8 file picker integration with SkyDrive and wanted us to similarly make it simple to integrate a SkyDrive file picker with their websites.

Based on this feedback, we recently released an update for the SkyDrive developer experience to

1. Remove all API restrictions related to photo resolution and content types
2. Provide a new, easy-to-use file picker API for websites (similar to our file picker for Windows 8 apps)

We're seeing many apps take advantage of these updates to unlock new possibilities.

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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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What Is New In SkyDrive – Metro Look & Context Menus

Microsoft is all up for a major revamp. Following Windows 8, Microsoft changed both Hotmail and Office software to a new look that goes with Windows 8. It seems Microsoft is racing for grabbing a major share of market space in portable devices. With Windows 8, it changed the interface of its operating systems from the traditional Windows style to the new Metro or Modern or Tiled  style. It also changed the look of its Office applications to the tiles-style to match Windows 8. This change is visible from Microsoft Office 2013 onward.

Not only that, it went ahead and changed Hotmail to Outlook – and again this has the look of what we may call “tiled interface”. The essential feature of this tiled-interface is plenty of white space between tiles so that people using touch navigation can go tapping happily on the tiles. The font too has increased at some places to enable finger touch (example, in the Navigation Options of Microsoft Outlook 2013).

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Best practices when adding single sign-on to your app with the Live SDK

A few months ago I wrote about how to bring single sign-on and SkyDrive to your Windows 8 apps with the Live SDK. Since then we made the Windows 8 Release Preview publicly available and we’ve begun to see some inconsistency in the design patterns forming in how apps expose entry points for users to sign in, connect accounts or sign-out of their experience.

To help you with these design patterns, we put together some guidelines for apps that want to use a user’s Microsoft account. In this post I share those guidelines with you and show you some code for how to get started.

 
There are three primary scenarios where your app might need to integrate authentication with Microsoft accounts:

1. Your app requires the user to be signed in to work.
2. Your app can work if the user isn’t signed in but provides a personalized experience for users that signed in.
3. Your app has specific tasks that require Microsoft account sign-in such as integrating with SkyDrive or Hotmail.

Now let’s dive into the details of each of these.

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