If you attended my Dynamic Data Controls session at TechEd then you'd have spotted the latest version of my Windows Mobile SMS Voter solution that is now an example of Software plus Services, local Intelligent processing extending out to a service layer. 

I've had a chance to tidy up the voting app since TechEd and will release V3 shortly at Smartphone.Net and Pocketgear.com, so watch this space:)

I learnt a stack about extending this Mobile app to a service layer and I'm going to write up a series of posts that cover the following:-

  1. Approaches to queuing and calling web services on a device: MSMQ vs Virtual Queues...
  2. Approaches to security, notably anonymity in a Mashup world and Device to Service Security
  3. Building a Popfly block and consuming Web Services with REST and POX (see http://www.popfly.ms/users/Glovebox/Why%20I%20Love%20TechEd, which graphs data from the backend vote system.
  4. Building a REST/POX services with ASP.NET and WCF.
  5. Service layer robustness
    1. Dealing with Service Exceptions - not a lot new on this one if you've done before
    2. Idempotence, surely a missed opportunity by Pfizer, but important for partially connected devices on transient networks.

There probably more but that'll do for starters...

I'd also like to thank the following for there help when I came unstuck

  1. Nick Randolph for ideas on on Device queuing.
  2. Mitch Denny for some device threading advice.
  3. and especially Peter Myers for help on SQL and his patience!!

This is my graphically challenged attempt to depict at a high level what the solution looks like...

 

image

Cheers Dave