Microsoft is very pleased to announce the release and general availability of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7.

This toolkit is designed to make it easier for phone developers to leverage cloud services running in Windows Azure. The toolkit includes Visual Studio project templates for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure, class libraries optimized for use on the phone, sample applications, and documentation.

Get the bits on CodePlex here: http://watoolkitwp7.codeplex.com/.

For a great article on how to get started, please take a look at this wiki: http://watoolkitwp7.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Getting%20Started&referringTitle=Documentation.

The toolkit contains the following resources:

  • Binaries – These are libraries we’ve written that you can use in your Windows Phone 7 applications to make it easier to work with Windows Azure (e.g. a full storage client library for blobs and tables). You can literally add these libraries to your existing Windows Phone 7 applications and immediate start leveraging services such as Windows Azure storage.
  •  Docs – We’ve provided documentation that covers setup and configuration, a review of the toolkit content, getting started, and some troubleshooting tips.
  • Dependency Checker – As you’ve come to expect and love, we provide a full dependency checker to ensure that you have all the bits required in order to successfully use the toolkit.
  • Project Templates – We have built VSIX (which is the unit of deployment for a Visual Studio 2010 Extension) files that create project templates that make it easy for you to build brand new applications.
  • Samples – We have a sample application that fully leverages the toolkit, both available in C# and VB.NET. The sample application is also built into one of the two project templates created by the toolkit.

For more information & coverage, please take a look at these resources: