Windows Phone provides an exciting opportunity for companies and developers to build applications that travel with users, are interactive and attractive, and are available whenever and wherever users want to work with them. The latest release of Windows Phone furthers this opportunity by enabling you to build many classes of applications that were not previously possible. By combining Windows Phone applications with on-premises services and applications, or remote services and applications that run in the cloud (such as those using Windows Azure), developers can create highly scalable, reliable, and powerful applications that extend the functionality beyond the traditional desktop or laptop, and into a truly portable and much more accessible environment. This book describes an end to end, realistic scenario concerning a fictitious company named Tailspin that has decided to embrace Windows Phone as a client device for their existing cloud-based application. Tailspin’s flagship product is an online service, named Surveys, that enables other companies or individuals to conduct their own online surveys. The Surveys mobile client application for Windows Phone OS 7.1 is used to capture survey data from the field, and then submit results to the Windows Azure hosted service through an API. This book is intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates applications and services for Windows Phone. It is written for people who work with Windows-based operating systems. You should be familiar with the.NET Framework, Visual Studio, and Visual C#. You will also find it useful to have some experience with Expression Blend and Silverlight, although this is not a prerequisite.