Excellent article shows how you can use web services hosted in Windows Azure and have it communicate across various devices, such as Windows Phone, iPhone, and Android. And have that service scale to terabytes in size.

My colleagues Bruno Terkaly and Ricardo Villalobos wrote the article for MSDN magazine Building a Massively Scalable Platform for Consumer Devices on Windows Azure.

The team describes:

• A RESTful Web services hosted in Windows Azure.
• JSON (and not XML) as the data format because it’s compact and widely supported.

And then they walk you through step-by-step in creating the Azure account, generating the Web service, and showing you code for the RESTful service. They show you how to deploy and then consume the service on each of the devices.

The explain, “Because Windows Azure-hosted RESTful Web services are based on HTTP, any client application that supports this protocol is capable of communicating with them. This opens up a wide spectrum of devices for developers, because the majority of devices fall into this category.”

How ISVs Scale with Consumer Devices on Azure

You can see how Sepia Labs uses these techniques for a real world application, Glassboard, in my Channel 9 video Social Media Goes Mobile with Glassboard on Azure.

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation