Writing a windows phone 7 application: part 1

After WPC 10 I realized that there is a lot of new stuff available or coming to us at high speed. You can certainly say the cloud and windows phone 7 were hot topics at WPC. About time to discover these technologies in somewhat more depth. To do that I decided to get hands on with "Windows Azure" and "Windows Phone 7" and create an application to uses them both.

There is a lot to say about writing a windows phone 7 application that uses WCF services that run in the cloud. The idea is to write several posts on the topic. This posts serves as an introduction and will give an high level overview of the architecture of the solution and the frameworks used. In the next posts I will explain in more detail how I implemented the different layers of the architecture.

Let's start with a picture:

I guess the diagram is pretty straightforward. Everything starts with the windows phone client that calls a WCF service that is hosted on windows azure. The windows phone client will be implemented with the help of Caliburn.Micro. The WCF services layer uses the Castle WCF integration facility to create services and resolve dependencies. In case the WCF service just has to retrieve something from the domain, it calls a repository. The repository uses NHibernate with the Azure driver to access the azure table storage. The repository then returns a domain object to the WCF service after which the WCF service uses AutoMapper to map the domain object to a data contract. The data contract is then returned to the windows phone client.

In the next post I will go into more detail on the repositories.