App Tethering Series Update

I’ve had a few questions from folks about the App Tethering articles I’ve been posting, specifically, when the next one is coming.

Between work and preparing for a grading I’ve been a bit busy, however I’ve now started writing the next post and have a few more planned. The next one should be up in a week or so.

Also, several people have asked if they can get them all combined into a single document. Once I have the remaining articles done I’ll combine them and post the details.

 

App Tethering : Remote Actions

After the last few posts, you should be getting comfortable sharing data between multiple apps. That leaves us the last of our original four conceptual areas to cover off : Actions.

Just as App Tethering allows you to share pieces of data out to remote applications, it also allows you to share TActions (strictly speaking, any TCustomAction descendant, but I’ll use TAction for short). Right now you’ve possibly got at least one button or menu item connected to a TAction somewhere in your app. More likely you have dozens of them. Shared Actions let you expose these TActions unchanged, so they can be triggered from remote apps as well. Read On…

App Tethering : Sharing Transient Resources

Now that we know how to work with Persistent Resources, Transient Resources are going to be a walk in the park.

Transient Resources have many things in common with Persistent Resources. They come in both Data and Stream types. They are one-way. Also their network behaviour is much the same as Persistent Resources. ie. Transient Data Resources are sent via UDP Point-to-Point whereas Transient Stream Resources are notified via UDP Point-to-Point but the value is actually transmitted via TCP.

Where they differ is mostly around the details of how they are sent, and how much work you have to do vs how much the framework does for you. Read On…

App Tethering : Sharing Persistent Resources Part 2

Last post we were introduced to sharing resources, in particular, persistent resources, and we wrote an example to share a persistent resource of type Data between two apps.

This time around let’s do the same with a resource of type Stream. On the surface it feels pretty similar, but we’ll look under the covers to understand a key difference between sharing Data and Stream resources, and why you might opt to use a Stream resource even if you are sharing a String.

Read On…

App Tethering : Sharing Persistent Resources Part 1

In the last post, we went through one method of discovery, AutoConnect, and then built a couple of apps that used AutoConnect to find, authenticate and pair with each other.

That’s fine, but there’s not a lot of point in having two apps connected to each other unless they can interact. In App Tethering, that interaction comes in two forms: sharing resources and sharing actions. In this article we’re going to start looking at sharing resources. Read On…