Building Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps

In this post, I'm going to kick off a series in which I'll walk through the creation of a back-end service for a Windows 8 app. This first post will provide an overview of the series, and introduce a couple of potential technologies you can use to build your back-end services.

The Challenge
As an example of a scenario that might merit a nicely abstracted back-end service, I'm going to create a simple leaderboard service that can store and retrieve high scores and win/loss/tie stats for a variety of games. Since it's where I've spent the majority of my time lately, I'm going to focus on games built with HTML and Javascript, but the platform choices I'm going to describe will work just as well for games and apps build with C# or VB and XAML..

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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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Searching in Windows 8 Thorough Charm Bar

Windows 8 Store Applications can take advantage of the shared “Charms” that you see when you swipe in from the right edge of your Windows 8 device (or press Win-C).  The top charm is searching and it provides tremendous functionality at relatively little programming effort.

When you click search Windows 8 assumes you want to search the current application if that application has registered a Search “contract.”  If it has not, Windows 8 will assume you want to search the applications, as shown in the figure (click on the figure for full size).

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Code Snippets for Windows Store Apps

In partnership with the Visual Studio team, we are launching Code Snippets for Windows Store apps, a collection of around 60 IntelliSense Code Snippets for common Windows Store app programming tasks. The snippets are available for Visual Basic, C#, C++, and JavaScript developers.

For example, if you don’t know how to copy a file in JavaScript or C++, just right-click, select Insert Snippet, select the code snippet, and it will automatically add the code to your Windows app as shown in the screenshots below.

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