Sinofsky told us workshop attendees that the closest analogy to a “contract” is a clipboard. (That got me thinking about former Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s “universal clipboard” concept — dating back to 2006. Ozzie’s universal clipboard, which he released under a Creative Commons license, was focused on connecting Web sites and desktop applications using a combination of RSS feeds, other XML data and the desktop clipboard. I don’t know how much the Windows 8 team relied on Ozzie’s vision and code, if at all.)

Microsoft officials did share more about the contracts concept during one of the Build sessions focused on the “Share” contract. The “currency” in a Share contract what’s known as a DataPackage. The data can be captured and shared in a number of different formats, including text, URI, HTML, images and other extensible formats.