Microsoft Announces Windows Azure Toolkits for Devices

Windows Azure Toolkits for Devices offer developers the tools necessary to support unified users experiences in cloud-to-mobile scenarios.

The company’s focus in on devs building applications designed to run on top of Windows Phone, iOS and Android.

In this sense, the software giant already made available Windows Azure Toolkit for iPhone (v1.0), Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone (v1.2) and Windows Azure Toolkit for Android (Prototype Preview).

“The toolkits leverage the cloud to simplify the complexity of supporting multiple devices,” said Jamin Spitzer, Senior Director, Platform Strategy, Microsoft.

“As a common back-end, developers can use cloud services to share common requirements like device notifications, authentication, storage and even higher-level services like leaderboards.

“At the same time, developers can maximize the performance of each mobile device by writing client code that exploits each platform. As more and more mobile applications rely on back-end services, the cloud can become increasingly useful and strategic for developers.”

In addition to the new Windows Azure Toolkits for Devices, Microsoft is also working to streamline the work necessary to set up Windows Azure services.

A “Cloud Ready” package accompanies the resources, focused on getting devs up and running as fast as possible.

I imagine that for some at least, the thought of adding Windows Azure to their projects raises inherent issues related to increased complexity.

“This package is designed to allow someone to quickly get started using Windows Azure without having to open and modify the services,” Spitzer added.

“Instead of having to open up Visual Studio and compile a solution with the services you want to use, we provide you with the Windows Azure CSPKG and CSCFG files prebuilt - all you need to do is update the configuration file to point to your account,” the company explained.

Watch the video embedded below in order to get an idea of what the “Cloud Ready” package is all about.

iOS:

https://github.com/microsoft-dpe/watoolkitios-lib
https://github.com/microsoft-dpe/watoolkitios-samples
https://github.com/microsoft-dpe/watoolkitios-doc
 

Windows Phone 7:

http://watoolkitwp7.codeplex.com