Month: November 2012

Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: OData – Part 2

In part 1 of this post, I showed how to create a SQL database in Windows Azure, create a schema for adding leaderboard functionality to a game, create an Entity Framework model for the database, and then create and test a WCF Data Service on top of the model that provides a rich REST-style interaction model with great query support via OData. If you have not yet read part 1, you should do so before continuing.

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Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: OData – Part 1

UPDATE: Part 2 of this post is now published as well.

It’s been longer than I planned, but this post is a follow-up to my overview post, “Building Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps”. In that post, I outlined a couple of different ways that you can build out data storage and services to provide a back-end for your Windows 8 app (and of course, these services can be shared with other apps as well).

Continue reading Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: OData – Part 1

W8WIL #8: Creating Your Store Logo

If you’ve spent any time at all browsing the Windows Store, you may have noticed that there are more than a few apps that show up with the default store logo, which is a simple box with an X through it. The default logo included with the Visual Studio project templates is intended to look unfinished, so that developers will hopefully replace this logo with one that’s appropriately branded for their app. Here’s what one of these apps looks like (I’ve obscured the name of the app to avoid embarrassing the developer):

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Notice that the app doesn’t have a great rating. Not necessarily a direct result of not having a nice store logo, but it doesn’t leave a great impression with potential customers.

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W8WIL #7: Uniquely Identifying Items in the Grid App JS Template

In this installment of Windows 8: What I’ve learned, I’ll discuss a bug in my app that came from a poor understanding of the underlying template I’d built on.

Getting Started with a Template

To jump start the development of my Windows Store app, Community Megaphone, I used the Grid App JavaScript template, shown below:

Continue reading W8WIL #7: Uniquely Identifying Items in the Grid App JS Template