Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure complement each other very well.  If you are developing a mobile solution a very useful application design is to implement an application that uses Windows Phone 7 as a front end user interface with local application processing that leverages cloud-based  common compute services and data bases in Windows Azure.

It has always been possible to build applications based on this model, however now it is even easier that before.  Microsoft has just released the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7.  This new toolkit helps ease the building of Windows Phone 7 applications that use services running on Windows Azure.

The toolkit provides you with:

• Binaries for your Windows Phone 7 applications
• Visual Studio Project templates to optimize new phone application creation
• Sample applications in both C# and VB.NET
• A dependency checker that checks the prerequisites required by the toolkit
• Setup and configuration documentation, toolkit content review, a getting started walkthrough, and troubleshooting tips

Using this toolkit you can easily generate a solution that include both phone and cloud components with a few clicks.  Then you can modify the generated solution to fit your  unique UI and Azure application requirements.

For more details see Wade Wegner’s blog post about the toolkit.  The toolkit itself can be downloaded from CodePlex here.

Bill Zack