C H A P T E R  3

Building Windows Phone 7 Applications Using Cloud Services As Data Stores

There’s lots of buzz today about cloud computing technology. By allowing you to offload infrastructure requirements, the cloud truly empowers you as a developer to focus on building an application.

Suppose you have developed an application where businesses can take pictures of invoices and then track the money they spend in a financial accounting program such as QuickBooks. In order for this application to be useful, you would need to save information from the invoices in some kind of database. With Windows Phone, you can easily use Isolated Storage (covered in Chapter 13) to support such an application. However, the problem with Isolated Storage is that the storage space is tied to the phone, which can differ from manufacturer to manufacturer; more importantly, many users will store music, videos, and other documents that consume storage space on the phone. A better solution would be to save the invoice information to a database. To do this, you would need to use a Web service that can interact with the database so that the phone can save the invoices, as shown in Figure 3-1.