In the next in their on-going Building Windows 8 series, Microsoft discussed activating Windows 8 contracts in your app.
This is how the new article starts:
When you start writing Metro style apps you’ll quickly come across contracts, a new and powerful concept in Windows 8. Metro style apps use contracts to declare interactions they support with other apps and with Windows. You’ve probably already heard about some of them: search, share, etc. Using contracts, apps become better by working with the system or with each other when users install more apps that implement contracts. In this post I’ll walk you through activation, one of the main concepts to think about as you add contracts to your apps.
The Windows activation platform is used to launch Metro Style apps and to notify them of the reason why a user launched them. The reasons vary from a user starting the app using its tile on the start screen to the app being launched for a specific task such as showing a user search results for a query. Windows provides your app with the reason it was launched and if applicable any additional info needed to complete its task. Before our Windows 8 activation platform, you passed this info to apps via command-line parameters. With our new model, we also support passing live objects such as a StorageFile, ShareOperation, etc to provide the app with context. You’ll see that this makes contracts all the more powerful. Let’s jump into the details of what you need to know to support being launched for a contract.
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