HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9
Integrating with the
Windows 8 environment
—Blaise Pascal
Operating systems owe their acceptance and circulation mostly to successful applications. There
are many ways to measure the success of an application. From the viewpoint of users, though, a
successful application is often simply an application that allows the user to perform a common task in
a seamless and comfortable way.
Consider a basic application that needs to save some text to a disk file. The primary goal of the
application is getting and then saving the text. However, to save the text users probably need to
choose a file name and a location on disk. These are ancillary tasks; necessary for the sake of the
application but beyond the primary goal of the application. As a developer, you should allocate time
to code these tasks too.
How would you code these accessory tasks, such as picking a file from disk? Without rules, each
application could come up with its own user interface. This is nefarious for users, who potentially face
a myriad of different interfaces; but it is also nefarious for developers, who have to write extra code
each and every time.
In this chapter, you will learn about
contracts
and practice with them. Contracts are specific
services for common tasks that applications can consume and expose for other applications to
consume. The ultimate goal of contracts is having more and more applications doing the same things
in the same way.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search