Building a Social Game with Windows Azure

In this lab, you will learn how to add Social Gaming features to your applications such as inviting friends using ACS and Social Providers, allow multi-players using both Storage Polling and NodeJs approaches and generate a leaderboard to show the top users' scores.

Overview

Building a game has multiple challenges, more if we are building social games that require multiplayers, contacting your friends, leaderboards and multiple ways to authenticate a user. In this lab, you will see how to take advantage of the Windows Azure services benefits when building a Social Game. Windows Azure offers Access Control service to authenticate your users using multiple Social Providers, such as Windows Live Id or Facebook. You can take advantage of Azure Table Storage to create a Leaderboard or to use it as a game storage, where clients access to update the game status in their browsers. Additionally, you will see how to use Node.JS to emit and broadcast the players game moves to other clients in real time.

Objectives

In this hands-on lab, you will learn how to:

• Add ACS Support and Invite friends
• Enable Multi-Player using Storage Polling
• Enable Multi-Player using Node.Js
• Create a Leaderboard using Azure Table Storage

Prerequisites

The following is required to complete this hands-on lab:

• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.6
• ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC 3
• Microsoft® Windows Identity Foundation SDK 4.0
• Microsoft® Windows Identity Foundation Runtime

Setup

In order to execute the exercises in this hands-on lab you need to set up your environment.

1. Open a Windows Explorer window and browse to the Source folder.
2. Double-click the Setup.cmd file in this folder to launch the setup process that will configure your environment and install the Visual Studio code snippets for this lab.
3. If the User Account Control dialog is shown, confirm the action to proceed.

Using the Code Snippets

Throughout the lab document, you will be instructed to insert code blocks. For your convenience, most of that code is provided as Visual Studio Code Snippets, which you can use from within Visual Studio 2010 to avoid having to add it manually.

If you are not familiar with the Visual Studio Code Snippets, and want to learn how to use them, you can refer to the Assets\Setup.docx document, which contains a section describing how to use them.

Exercises

This hands-on lab includes the following exercises:

1. Adding Social Providers and Inviting Friends
2. Enable Multiplayer with Storage Polling
3. Enable Multiplayer with Node.js
4. Creating a Leaderboard

Estimated time to complete this lab: 90 minutes.