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October 3, 2010

Cooking Up a Storm

Last month, my team and I had the opportunity to present at the Dallas Cloud Computing User Group.  It was a fantastic presentation, led by our lead developer extraordinaire Trent (www.trentacular.com).  The topic was centered around fusing Windows Azure and Windows Phone 7 and it was …. awesome.  Here’s what we did:

  1. Created a WP7 application that connected to a simple little CRM system
  2. Said CRM system was built using SQL Azure (couple tables, a view and that’s about it)
  3. The SQL tables were then exposed (for ease of WP7 construction) via an Azure web role that exposed an updatable ODATA endpoint.

The application was very slick – we had it going in no time and we also had fun figuring out that the SQL Azure Labs ODATA endpoint wasn’t kidding when they said there were some ‘known’ limitations – namely, the ability to connect linked tables together in an ODATA query.

This month as it happens, the cloud computing group has requested us to present again.  So, we’re cooking up a bit more Windows Phone 7 love for you guys and adding in the AppFabric to the mix:

  1. Create an ACL endpoint that allows us to facilitate identity from the phone to represent a user.
  2. Create a service bus endpoint to allow asynchronous transfers and listeners such that changes to the data store don’t require a refresh on the phone to show up.

We hope you’ll join us on Thursday at Microsoft in Dallas to see our newest little creation!