The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 is a starter kit that was recently released out to CodePlex. Wade Wegner, one of my former team mates when both of us were in Central Region, is the master mind behind this fantastic starter.
This starter kit is designed to make it easier for you to build mobile applications that leverage cloud services running in Windows Azure.
Screencast
In the screencast, you’ll get a great little walkthrough of the starter kit and how to get your first Windows Phone 7 application with a Windows Azure backend up and running. The toolkit includes a bunch of stuff including Visual Studio project templates that will create the Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure projects, class libraries optimized for use on the phone, sample applications and documentation.
Why Windows Azure
Windows Azure is Microsoft’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that allows you to build and scale your application in the cloud so that you don’t have to build out your local infrastructure. If you are selling an application in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and really don’t know how many customers you’ll end up with, you might need to scale the backend dramatically to meet the demand.
What you’ll need
Hopefully obviously you’ll need an Azure account and the tools to build and deploy the solution. The tools include one of the versions of Visual Studio (either Express which is free or higher), the Windows Azure Toolkit and then obviously the starter kit itself. I also recommend looking at Expression Blend for doing your Windows Phone 7 design and the like.
Good Luck!
By looking through the resources on the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 site, you’ll see lots of great little tutorials and getting started guides.
Let me know how you’re getting on with the toolkit and what you’ve done with it. I’d like to see and possibly blog about it all…