Will metro style windows 8 apps support local database access?

windows-8 microsoft-metro
muhan picture muhan · Jan 19, 2012 · Viewed 8.3k times · Source

I want to build a metro style win 8 app which needs to access a local database (installed on the users pc) of information such as sql express.

The current beta builds of win 8 dont seem to support that. Has Microsoft released any info on whether this will be supported? Something like ado.net, entity framework, linq sql?

Answer

ChristiaanV picture ChristiaanV · Jan 19, 2012

No, Windows 8 Metro style apps will not support connecting to a local database. That is to say, you will not be able to use a kind of connectionstring where you can say connect to server X. This has to do with the "Market store" principle that applications should work out of the box without configuring a database connection.

Probably there will be support for a local database as in Windows Phone 7 (SQL CE) with Linq to sql on top of it.

If you would like to access a database that's in a central location, than you will have to expose the data from the database with webservices which can be consumed by your metro style application.

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