Create an Azure-integrated Windows 7 Phone App

The cloud wants smart devices. It also wants Web access, and native applications that take advantage of the unique capabilities of user’s laptops and desktop machines. The cloud wants much of us.

Once upon a time, the rush was on to produce native Windows applications, then it became “you need a web strategy”, and then “you need a mobile strategy”. Therefore it is natural to sigh and try to ignore it when told “you need a cloud strategy”. However, one of the great advantages of Microsoft’s development technologies is their integration across a wide range of devices connected to the cloud: phones and ultra-portable devices, laptops, desktops, servers, and scale-on-demand datacenters. For storage, you can use either the familiar relational DB technology that SQL Azure offers, or the very scalable but straightforward Azure Table Storage capability. For your user interfaces, if you write in XAML you can target WPF for Windows or Silverlight for the broadest array of devices. And for your code, you can use modern languages like C# and, shortly, Visual Basic.

Trying to simultaneously tackle a phone app, a web app, and a native Windows app is a little intimidating the first time. Larry O’Brien shows you how surprisingly easy this task becomes with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET technologies.

Read the entire article, Custom Walkthrough: To Do—Create an Azure-integrated Windows 7 Phone App.

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