So far, we've been focusing on designing and building the graphical elements of applications. Most modern software isn't complete without a solid connection to internet services and networking features. Adding dependencies to remote services could affect the stability of an application if it isn't correctly managed. Concurrency is also a key part of managing an interaction with remote services; we'll need to add more advanced task handling to manage these various communication channels.

In this chapter, we'll explore the following topics:

• Thread handling and managing the user interface
• Including remote resources in your application
• Connecting to cloud services and handling error cases
• Maintaining user experience when the network disconnects

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to integrate remote resources and cloud services into your application. You'll also see how to maintain a responsive user interface despite this new functionality relying on network connections that may be unreliable or unavailable. The addition of long-running background processes and the communication challenges they can cause will be completely solved as your application is updated to manage data from a multitude of sources.