The Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games makes it easier for developers to quickly build social and casual games using Windows Azure. Last week, we released version 1.2.2 of the toolkit. You can download the source here or the self-extracting package here. This version adds significant performance increases, improved stability, and now uses Autofac for dependency injection. Additionally, as part of this release, we have moved the toolkit Github – this allows you to easily fork, clone, and contribute back to the toolkit in the same fashion you can with the open sourced Windows Azure SDKs.
For those who haven’t downloaded or used the social gaming toolkit yet I would encourage you to check it out. There are a lot of common patterns and tons of reusable code in the toolkit that applies for many scenarios besides the gaming space. With more and more applications relying on real-time communication, sharing, and feedback the mechanisms that are used in games can be applied to many kinds of software.
The core features of this toolkit are:
- Samples Games (Tic-Tac-Toe and Four in a Row)
- Authentication with ACS (Access Control service)
- JavaScript Tests
- Leaderboard
- Game Friends
- User Profiles
- Invites and Notifications
- Tests for both server and client code
- Reusable JavaScript libraries
You can read more about the social gaming toolkit on the project site’s wiki. We have documents that will help you get started using the toolkit and deploying the toolkit. Additionally, you will find blog posts about this release and other on my blog.
