Create new Charm that other apps can use?

Question

The charms concept (aka plugins/extensions) in Windows 8 is nice. It would be even better, if we could provide our own charm that other ISV could develop for?

Lets say we have an app that displays data and allows other apps to modify the visual layout of this data, depending on the content.

Have the WinRT developers thought of such scenarios, to allow developers to create their own charms?

Answer 1

Hi Phil,

The charms are a system menu.  Imagine the confusion if every developer on the planet thought their charm was a 'must have feature' for every consumer.  Remember that the Metro Apps are sandboxed and should not affect other applications.  Opening up the charms would break this!  As a consumer, I sure don't want a bunch of charms added by developers to my system!

-Jeff

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Jeff Sanders (MSFT)

Answer 2

ah you right, Jeff. I was confusing the charms with applications extensions like file picker and search provider.

So there is no extension mechanism in metro style apps that would allow 3rd party to extend our metro app via the market place?

 

What about if we implement extensions ourself in our metro app. Could we download (trusted) code inside our app, store it on the users computer and execute it inside our metro app?

We could download the available extensions (js, css, html) from our own website when the metro app is running, and store it in a place our metro app has access to (user folder?).