OData & Cloud Augmentation of Windows Phone Apps

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This e-book collects all 3 parts of SilverlightShow article series on using OData and Azure in Windows Phone. Source code is linked as an external link.

From the author:

Windows Azure & Windows Phone seem to be two very popular technologies out of Redmond right now.

There is obviously a lot of buzz around cloud infrastructure involving Azure solutions and the wonderful developer story that we have for Windows Phone development. But, should these two platforms work together & if so, can they? How can you as a Mobile/Windows Phone developer utilize the cloud?

In the first chapter of this ebook, we talk about how to leverage Windows Azure to supplement our Windows Phone application. In particular, we see how SQL Azure can be rather beneficial in providing globally accessible & scalable backend for mobile solutions on Windows Phone & other disparate platforms. The key link we leverage is OData Services for providing cross-platform read/write access to a central data repository.

Chapter two unveils ways in which Azure can be of much benefit in hosting WCF Services, which in turn communicate with remote Databases & could easily provide CRUD operation functionality to your backend server. You can take this concept & literally make your services do anything you want. Azure just makes hosting a snap, with high availability & failover. And, each of these Services can be easily consumed from Mobile applications, like the Windows Phone one in our case.

Chapter three discusses consumption of OData from a Windows Phone application and the subsequent serialization/deserialization of data collections. These techniques should help in building lean applications which are careful about misuse of the user’s bandwidth in fetching the same data over & over again. So, what are you waiting for? Expose just about any data store as an OData feed, put appropriate security on the data & consume it responsibly from multiple mobile platforms!