Your Data Everywhere, Part 4: Consuming LightSwitch's OData Services from Windows 8 Store Apps
After new releases of developer tools and operating systems, I decided to continue my "Your Data Everywhere" series to explore how you can work with LightSwitch's OData services in Windows 8 Store Apps. This is another great opportunity for sharing LightSwitch data with mobile devices.
Introduction
With recent releases of Microsoft Windows 8 and new kinds of devices such as tablets running this latest version of the Windows operating system, having an opportunity of accessing data wherever users are is even more important. This is particularly apt if you build data-centric applications with Visual Studio LightSwitch 2012, which enables developers to expose data sources through networks as OData services. For instance, imagine a company having an application built with Visual Studio LightSwitch, and the company's representatives need to go to customers and show the new products on a tablet with Windows 8. If the tablet only supports the Windows Runtime (WinRT), as is the case for ARM tablets, Windows 8 Store Apps are the only way to do it. With OData, an app for Windows 8 can easily connect to a LightSwitch data source and make all the necessary actions, providing an additional opportunity for data portability.
Actually, the information in this article can be applied to any OData service; it's not limited to LightSwitch data sources. But continuing the article series on Visual Studio LightSwitch can give you a better idea of what you can do today with the most recent development tools from Microsoft.