Windows Azure and Metro apps on Windows 8

Question

I have at least 5 billion ideas for a new application on Windows 8. However, most of them rely on a remote database connection.

This is currently not possible with Metro apps. But I do not want to just work. Or a script that accesses an API that will access the database and return results. So, I went to the MS forums and found somewhere a message (which, it seems to me, cannot be found right now), stating that I can just use the Windows Azure SQL database and can connect to it from Windows Metro.

But I do not see any resources or documentation to support this, and I completely lost what to do.

Most applications these days need to communicate with the outside world in order to offer any personalized user interface, and it is simply impossible to do in Metro applications from what I see.

Does anyone know if you can connect to SQL Azure SQL DB from a Metro-style app? Any resources / Documents / Links / Examples that you know about?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Metro applications are optimized for tablets and, as a rule, devices with limited work with processors and batteries. Direct connection to the database and processing of the results are expensive in terms of CPU, battery and bandwidth.

What's more, database protocols are not cached and are not designed to work with Internet delays. Your application can spend a lot of time trying and trying to connect to the database every time the connection quality deteriorates.

The best option would be to set up WCF data services on top of your database and expose them to your application. It's easy to create a WCF data service on top of the Entity Framework, and the OData protocol used by WCF data services allows you to query your objects using LINQ asynchronously. More complex processing can be done on the web server.

Answer 2

At this point, Metro does not have System.Data, so there is no direct connection to the database. You will need to contact the database through WCF with the web service.

Metro has a user configuration tool, but I cannot find it right now. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/BR208189

The story is that the transition point for Metro was Silverlight. Without saying that only what I read makes sense. Looks like Microsoft wants Metro Metro Metro storage.