Windows Phone 7 And The Cloud

This hands-on lab introduces you to the tools and the steps required to build an small Silverlight Windows Phone 7 application that consumes a WCF Data Services from an application hosted in Windows Azure.

Overview

This hands-on lab introduces you to the tools and the steps required to build a small Silverlight Windows Phone 7 application that consumes a WCF Data Services from an application hosted in Windows Azure.

WCF Data Services enables you to expose and consume data from different devices and infrastructures leveraging the Open Data Protocol (OData). OData is a protocol that allows you to expose your data as resources that are addressable by URIs. This enables you to use the semantics of representational state transfer (REST) for accessing the exposed data. The standard HTTP verbs of GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE are supported by it.

In this hands-on lab, you will be creating a simplified version of the MyTODO sample; first, you will expose its entity model through a WCF Data Service, which will then be consumed by the Windows Phone 7 Client. MyTODO is a Microsoft Developer & Platform Evangelism sample application built on Windows Azure to manage and share simple lists (e.g. tasks to complete, favorite movies, books you enjoyed, etc.).

If you want to explore a complete version of the myTODO sample application, you can download it from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mytodo.

Objectives

In this hands-on lab, you will learn how to:

• Expose an Entity Framework model using WCF Data Services
• Create a Windows Phone 7 Client that consumes WCF Data Services

Prerequisites

The following is required to complete this hands-on lab:

• IIS 7 (with ASP.NET, WCF HTTP Activation)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.6
• Windows Phone 7 SDK

Setup

For convenience, much of the code used in this hands-on lab is available as Visual Studio code snippets. To check the prerequisites of the lab and install the code snippets:

1. In order to allow the solution to connect with the database using SQL Server credentials, open SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the local SQL Server (i.e. .\sqlexpress).
2. Right click the server node and select Properties.
3. Select Security and make sure SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode is selected.

   

   Figure 1

   SQL Server Properties - Security

4. Click OK.
5. Restart the SQL Server instance to allow the previous configuration change to take effect.

   

   Figure 2

   Restart SQL Server

6. Open a Windows Explorer window and browse to the lab’s Source folder.
7. Double-click the Setup.cmd file in this folder to launch the set up process that will configure your environment and install the Visual Studio code snippets for this lab.
8. If the User Account Control dialog is shown, confirm the action to proceed.

Using the Code Snippets

Throughout the lab document, you will be instructed to insert code blocks. For your convenience, most of that code is provided as Visual Studio Code Snippets, which you can use from within Visual Studio 2010 to avoid having to add it manually.

If you are not familiar with the Visual Studio Code Snippets, and want to learn how to use them, you can refer to the Setup.docx document in the Assets folder of the training kit, which contains a section describing how to use them.

Exercises

This hands-on lab includes the following exercises:

1. Connecting Windows Phone 7 with WCF Data Services.

Estimated time to complete this lab: 30 minutes.