Entity Framework – Low Code Life

Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: ASP.NET Web API

In this series, I’m exploring a variety of ways to build back-end data storage and services for Windows 8 apps (many of which, BTW, can also be used for other mobile and web apps as well). Here are the posts so far:

Overview – High-level view of some of the available platform technologies, and a discussion of the game leaderboard scenario I’m using to demonstrate them, as well as the games I’m using for my demos.
Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: OData – Part 1 – Creating the database and schema, using Entity Framework to model the data store, and using WCF Data Services to expose the model via as a RESTful service with rich queryability.
Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: OData – Part 2 – Deploying the service to Windows Azure, and wiring up the leaderboard service to the games, using a custom JavaScript library with a well-defined API.

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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

Building Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps

Introduction

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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