Contoso Food & Dining Sample App
I’m excited to announce that the Food & Dining sample app is available for download from the Windows Store!
For a couple of months in 2012, I worked with a great team of evangelists across US DPE (DPE is Developer and Platform Evangelism, my business group at Microsoft): Ian Bennett, Jennifer Marsman, Jerry Nixon, Jim Blizzard, Jit Ghosh, and Harry Mower. We built out a sample app to use as a reference implementation, something more complex and real-world than a code sample illustrating one small feature or a Hello World.
The Food & Dining app pulls real restaurant data from Yelp and displays trending restaurants for a location. You can choose a location, or use the location services to have it find your current location. You may read recent restaurant reviews for your location, add restaurants to your Favorites list, pin a restaurant as a secondary tile, view a restaurant on a map via the Bing Maps integration, see the latest restaurant review via a live tile, browse a picture gallery for a restaurant, get restaurant address/phone number, and more. There is also sample data from New York City included so you can see something in an offline scenario without connectivity to Yelp (we in DPE often need to demo that way). To turn off the sample data, go to the Settings charm –> Settings, and set “Sample data” to “Off”.
It really is a gorgeous app (thanks to the amazing designers at UI Centric who did the design work, not me). As you scroll through the main hub, there is a beautiful parallax effect with the background images.
I personally owned the tiles for the project. I’ve written two articles based on my code and experience with this project:
- Real-World Secondary Tiles: Top Three Tips for Working with Secondary Tiles in Windows 8 Apps
- Real-World Live Tiles: Working with Live Tiles in Windows 8 Apps
So how do you get it? Here are the important links:
Download app from the Windows Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-US/app/windows-8-food-dining-sample-app/c06ffb8b-42ae-42a4-8f29-aae099beaa6c
Download source code from SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/win8fooddinings/
Associated Win8Center content: https://windows8center.sourceforge.net/sample-application-food-and-dining/
Here is the app’s official description:
The Windows 8 Food & Dining app allows the user to set their location either using a destination name (ex. New York, NY) or by finding their current location. With location set, the user will be presented with Trending Restaurants (restaurants with a number of recent positive reviews), Recently Reviewed (restaurants with recent reviews), Top Near Me (highest rated restaurants close to the user’s set location) and Favorites.
Each of these sections can be viewed in grid form where the user can filter each collection by cuisine, price range and more. The user can also choose to show the results on a map view.
The restaurant details page shows the full restaurant details including a snap shot of reviews from Yelp, the menu from OpenMenu and images associated with the restaurant collected from Bing.
The app was built as a reference application that examples how to build a complete application for Windows 8 using best practices for data acquisition, user control and more.
Hope it’s useful!
