As we get closer to the launch of Windows Phone 7, over 200,000 developers have downloaded our free tools from http://developer.windowsphone.com/. Many of them are just getting started while others are Silverlight veterans that want to bring their skills to Microsoft’s new mobile platform. My goal in this series of blog posts on Windows Phone 7 Line of Business App Dev is to take you beyond simple examples and show you how to build end-to-end Enterprise/Internet-Scale solutions. This means that you will need more than the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone Beta. You will also need Visual Studio 2010 Professional or a higher to build the server-side code.
If you happened to catch my session titled “Developing Occasionally Connected Applications for Windows Phone 7” at Tech Ed North America 2010 in New Orleans, then you probably have a good idea where I’m going with this. My goal is to walk you through the WCF REST services that return JSON-serialized objects to your Windows Phone 7 app. Next, I’m going to show you how to consume those REST services with the WebClient object and store that data in an in-memory object cache. From there, you’ll query the object cache using LINQ and databind your results to UI elements. Last but not least, I’ll show you how to serialize your objects to Isolated Storage so your app can keep working even when you’re not connected. Let’s check out the video from Tech Ed so you’ll see what I’m talking about:
If you like what you saw in the video then stick around for this series of blog posts where I’ll show you the code you need to build large-scale solutions with Windows Phone 7.
-Rob
