Developing an Advanced Windows Phone 7.5 App that Connects to the Cloud (Microsoft patterns & practices)

Windows Phone provides an exciting opportunity for companies and developers to build applications that travel with users, are interactive and attractive, and are available whenever and wherever users want to work with them. The latest release of Windows Phone furthers this opportunity by enabling you to build many classes of applications that were not previously possible. By combining Windows Phone applications with on-premises services and applications, or remote services and applications that run in the cloud (such as those using Windows Azure), developers can create highly scalable, reliable, and powerful applications that extend the functionality beyond the traditional desktop or laptop, and into a truly portable and much more accessible environment. This book describes an end to end, realistic scenario concerning a fictitious company named Tailspin that has decided to embrace Windows Phone as a client device for their existing cloud-based application. Tailspin’s flagship product is an online service, named Surveys, that enables other companies or individuals to conduct their own online surveys. The Surveys mobile client application for Windows Phone OS 7.1 is used to capture survey data from the field, and then submit results to the Windows Azure hosted service through an API. This book is intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates applications and services for Windows Phone. It is written for people who work with Windows-based operating systems. You should be familiar with the.NET Framework, Visual Studio, and Visual C#. You will also find it useful to have some experience with Expression Blend and Silverlight, although this is not a prerequisite.

David Britch is a Principal Technologist at CM Group Ltd and has authored and contributed to a range of recent software development publications including books, guidance documentation, whitepapers, videos, HOLs, and ILT courses. David holds a PhD in Computation, specializing in image and signal processing.

Francis Cheung is a developer in the Microsoft patterns & practices team where he has been involved in a diverse array of projects including the Mobile Client Software Factory, Microsoft Solutions Framework, Composite Application Guidance for WPF (aka Prism), Web Client Application Guidance, SharePoint Developer Guidance, Windows Phone Developer Guidance, and most recently Mobile Web Development Guidance. As a Lead Developer, Francis works closely with MVP advisors, customers, and product team members to help provide guidance.

Rohit Sharma is a Senior Test Lead in the Microsoft patterns & practices team where he has been involved as Test Engineer/ Test lead on various projects including Enterprise Library, BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0, Windows Phone Developer Guidance, Applying SOA Design Patterns and most recently on Windows Store app using C++ and XAML: Hilo.

Beginning life as an art student, growing up in the military and then joining the world of software; Adam Kinney feels right at home in that sweet spot between visual design and user interface development. Always at least a part-time evangelist, Adam has traveled the trail of UI technologies. First HTML and CSS, then Flash, WPF, Silverlight, Processing, iOS and Canvas. He has enjoyed learning, teaching and experimenting with them all. Previously working as a Technical Evangelist for Microsoft covering technologies such as Silverlight and Expression Blend; Adam is now working as an independent consultant specializing in HTML5 and Windows 8 projects.

Foreword by: Jeff Wilcox