Building an Office 365 Cloud business application using Visual Studio 2013

Today, the requirements, expectations, and importance of business applications have reached unprecedented heights. Modern business applications need access to data that is available within and outside the organization. They need to connect different individuals within the organization to help them collaborate in a rich and interesting way. The application itself needs to be able to be used on a variety of devices in a variety of shapes, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops with different screen sizes.

You need a platform to provide a range of services to meet the core requirements of these applications. You also need a toolset to efficiently build these applications and integrate with existing development operations processes within your organization.

This article describes how Visual Studio 2013 can help you build this latest business application. We will create a recruitment application to manage job ads and candidates (while providing seamless extensions to Office 365 and Windows Azure platforms) and use Office 365 services such as identity and social networking.

We'll describe how Visual Studio can help you work more effectively in the lifecycle of the entire cloud business application from building, running, and testing to publishing and using continuous integration.

Create a new project

First, start Visual Studio 2013. Click "File" | " New Project ". The Cloud Business application template is provided under the Office/sharepoint Application node of visual Basic and Visual C # (see Figure 1.) This classification method is based on the language used in the middle tier, and the client is HTML and JavaScript.

Figure 1 Creating a new cloud business application project in Visual Studio 2013

The cloud business application consists of four projects:

Server project, which is a basic ASP.net project for adding tables and connecting to data sources

SharePoint standard Application project, which provides connectivity to Office 365

Htmlclient project, which is a JavaScript project used to define the application UI (screen)

Cloud Business Application project, which links all projects together. You can see the structure of the Visual Studio project in Figure 2 .

Figure 2 Cloud Business Application Architecture

We'll show you how to use all of these items.

Defining the data Model

The core of any business application is data. Cloud business applications provide a variety of ways to interact with this data. We first use the Table Designer to define a new data model. We will later deploy this data model to Windows Azure SQL Database. We use Table Designer to define candidate entities. Figure 3 shows the details of the data model. An entity consists of attributes, which are simple data types, such as strings or integers, or business types such as "URL", "Email address", or "person". Specific validation logic and unique visualization features are built into the visual Studio tools and runtimes.

Figure 3 Candidate Entity details