Windows Store App Development: C# and XAML

Chapter 14. Contracts: playing nicely with others

This chapter covers

• Contracts
• Sharing with other apps
• Implementing search

Over the years, desktop apps have used a variety of mechanisms to integrate with each other. We’ve seen shared memory, shared memory mapped files, regular flat C-style DLLs, ActiveX, classic COM (Component Object Model) and other forms of COM automation like the much-hated DCOM (Distributed COM), DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange—remember that one?), socket communication, named pipes, and more. Each of these approaches had its good and bad points. Some, like DDE, were really brittle. Others, like COM, were complex to do well. Some like DCOM, no one ever really got working well. None of these mechanisms had any focus on the ...