This week, our MSDN Flash guest post is from Alex Homer who works on the Microsoft patterns & practices team as a Technical Writer. Alex and team have been busy delivering Windows Azure guidance and have now extended that guidance to incorporate cloud services with Windows Phone 7.
Alex is well-known to many of us in the UK as both a speaker and an author. He blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/alexhomer/
p&p Goes Mobile with Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure
Microsoft patterns & practices (p&p) is a small group of technology-passionate architects, developers, writers, and evangelists hidden away in the woods in a quiet corner of Redmond campus and sprinkled thinly across many countries around the globe. They strive constantly to provide developers with predictable results by using proven practices. p&p develops guidance and documentation in a myriad different forms, books, configurable reusable code frameworks, end to end samples, and much more in order to help developers be more successful when working with the Microsoft platform, tools, and technologies.
Always at the leading edge of new technologies, one of their most recent series of projects demonstrates how easy it is for developers to make used of their existing skills to join the growing mobile revolution by developing for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure cloud services. The Windows Azure Guidance project is divided into phases that cover migrating applications to the cloud, building new applications and services for the cloud, and leveraging the cloud.
As an accompaniment to this project, the same team is creating a guide to building applications on Windows Phone 7 and the cloud right now. It shows how easy it is to take your Silverlight and .NET experience (and code), using familiar tools such as Visual Studio, and very quickly create great looking and great performing applications that integrate a compelling mobile user experience with the capabilities and availability of cloud-based services.
The guides are based around the experiences of planning, architectural design, and development in fictional corporations, and include written material that describes their journey; and adds extra information that is useful within the application and environmental space inhabited by Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and Windows Phone 7. The projects also provide you with downloadable reference implementations—real code for the applications that you can install and run, and use to help you develop your own applications.
Isn’t it time you were getting mobile with Windows Phone 7, and moving into the cloud? For more information about p&p, the Windows Azure Guidance project, and the Windows Phone 7 project see the following resources: