Windows Store Archives - Page 3 of 4

Quick Hits Issue #5: Resources for App Developers and User Groups

In this issue, I’ve got some great resources for app developers, as well as for user groups:

Get up to Speed on HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript

If you’ve done some web development, but want to kick your skills up a notch, check out Learn HTML5 with JavaScript & CSS3 Jump Start Training, a course from Microsoft Virtual Academy. The course covers HTML Semantic Markup, CSS3 Selectors, Layout and Animation, JavaScript Core and DOM Interaction, and more.

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Microsoft DevRadio: Using Windows Azure to Build Back-End Services for Windows 8 Apps (Part 2)

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Quick Hits Issue #4: Tips for Windows Store Apps

In this issue I’d like to share a few items of interest to folks building Windows Store apps:

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Quick Hits Issue #3: New Meetups, Game Development, and more!

New Meetup Group

I’m pleased to announce a new Meetup group for Windows App Developers in the DC area. The group will focus on local workshops, hackathons, office hours, and other events featuring myself and other local technical evangelists.

If you’re not in the DC Area, check out these other meetups, featuring some of my peers in the east region:

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Microsoft DevRadio: Using Windows Azure to Build Back-End Services for Windows 8 Apps (Part 1)

Here’s my next DevRadio installment, this time with me as a guest, with my fellow TEs, Brian Hitney and Peter Laudati hosting. In it, we discuss some of the topics in my blog series on building back-end services for Windows 8 apps.

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Quick Hits Issue 2: Privacy is Paramount (and easy)

In this second issue of Quick Hits, I want to share a couple of good posts on the topic of privacy policies for Windows Store apps. You may have heard already that if your app connects to the internet (and many, if not most, apps do), you are required to provide a privacy policy for your app, one that is accessible both from within the app (via the Settings charm) and from the app’s store listing.

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Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: Adding Push Notifications

In previous installments of this series, I’ve shown how you can quickly create REST-based services accessible via HTTP that allow you to easily store and retrieve data in a Windows Store app, using several different approaches including WCF Data Services, ASP.NET Web API, and the new Windows Azure Mobile Services. You can read all of the previous parts of the series here. I recommend reading the intro post at a minimum, so you’re familiar with the games I’m using to demonstrate the concepts in the series.

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Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: Windows Azure Mobile Services

If you’ve been following along with this series so far, you know we’ve come along way, from my overview of the series, which described the target scenario of a simple leaderboard service for a couple of JavaScript-based Windows 8 games, to the 2-part post (Part 1 / Part 2) on building this service using WCF Data Services, and hosting as an Azure Cloud Service, to the most recent installment, in which I showed how to build the same service using ASP.NET Web API, and hosted in a Windows Azure Web Site.

To round out the group of solutions I’m exploring in the series, in this post I’ll show you how to build the same game leaderboard service on top of the new Windows Azure Mobile Services (in preview as of this writing).

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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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