Page 24 - MSDN Magazine, May 2018

UNIVERSAL WINDOWS PLATFORM
Building Connected
Apps with UWP
and Project Rome
Tony Champion
In today’s world, building a successful app means moving beyond a single device. Users want apps that span all their devices and even connect with other users. Providing this type of experi- ence can be a daunting challenge, to say the least. To help address this growing need in the ecosystem, Microsoft introduced Project Rome. Project Rome aims to create a more personal OS that spans apps, devices and users. While Project Rome has SDKs available for most major platforms, in this article I’m going to explore using Project Rome to create a team messaging Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app.
Say Hello to Project Rome
Project Rome is an initiative to help you drive user engagement across apps and devices. It’s a collection of APIs that are part of
Microsoft Graph and can be categorized into two areas: continue now and continue later.
The Remote System APIs enable an app to break beyond the boundaries of the user’s current device, enabling a continue-now experience. Whether allowing the user to use two devices for a single experience, as with a companion or remote-control app, or allowing multiple users to connect and share a single experi- ence, these APIs provide an expanded view of the user’s current engagement. The team messaging app built in this article will cre- ate a shared user experience.
The other half of Project Rome, the Activities APIs, focuses on continuing the user’s experience at a later time. These APIs allow you to record and retrieve specific actions within your app that the user can continue from any device. Though I don’t discuss them in this article, these are definitely worth looking into.
Getting Started
Before diving into building the app, I first need to set up my environment. While the first version of Project Rome has been out for a little while, some of the features used in this article were just released during the recent Fall Creators Update. Therefore, your machine must be running build number 16299 or greater. At this point, this release is available in the slow ring for updates and most machines should be updated correctly.
Running apps with the Remote System APIs with other users requires that shared experiences are enabled on the machine. This
This article discusses:
• The Project Rome RemoteSystem API
• Building remote sessions
• Enabling communication between devices
Technologies discussed:
Project Rome, Universal Windows Platform, Visual Studio 2017, Visual C#
Code download available at:
bit.ly/2FWtCc5
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