Question

i want to develop a wp7 application that can store geospatial data and pictures in an azure database.

does anyone have an idea on how to do this? Do i use blobs?

Cheers

Answer 1

There are a couple of codeplex and Microsoft projects that will help you

Firstly this community quick start – http://wp7azurequickstarts.codeplex.com/
Secondly the official toolkit – http://watoolkitwp7.codeplex.com/

There is a walkthrough which shows how MS recommend you upload photos to blob storage – http://watoolkitwp7.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Running%20and%20Going%20Through%20the%20Windows%20Phone%207%20Cloud%20Application

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The basic structure you use is:

• a service which your app can call in Azure compute
• that service can then store things in Blob, Table or SQL storage – most likely it will
  • store images in Blob
  • store index information in SQL (or maybe in table)

Note that while the app itself could upload direct to Azure Blob storage, this would most likely require you to distribute your secret private keys along with the app – which wouldn’t be a good thing to do. If you did want to optimise the communications in you application, then you could implement a direct upload to blob using a shared access key retrieved from your Azure service (but I think this is only a small optimisation)