Template of the week: Windows 8 Find a nearby…

This template will help you build apps for Windows 8 that find nearby points of interest.

This blog is part of a series

How many times have you wanted to find a nearby restaurant? gas station? grocery store?

This Windows 8 sample project provides you with a good sample structure and code for building apps to help users find nearby businesses.

The sample project is a food and dining app. You can download it here.

The app allows the user to specify their location with either a destination name (ex. Halifax, NS) or with their current location.

The user is presented with Trending Restaurants (restaurants with a number of recent positive reviews), Recently Reviewed (restaurants with recent reviews), Top Near Me (highest rated restaurants close to the user’s set location) and Favourites.

Each sections is displayed in a grid. The user can filter each collection by cuisine, price range and more. The user can also choose to show the results on a map view.

The restaurant details page shows the full restaurant details including a snap shot of reviews from Yelp, the menu from OpenMenu and images associated with the restaurant collected from Bing.

The app was built as a reference application that examples how to build a complete application for Windows 8 using best practices for data acquisition, user control and more.

Don’t forget if you are in Canada and you are publishing apps check out Developer Movement, you may be able to get rewards for the apps you publish!