Yacine Khammal has just published a new course: Building Windows Phone Applications with Azure

Today’s mobile applications greatly benefit from leveraging the cloud for back-end storage and services. Accessing the Windows Azure platform from Windows Phone applications makes for unlimited possibilities for developers. However, working with Azure from a device comes with challenges, such as dealing with HTTP-based communication and access control. The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone was created by people from Microsoft to simplify make mobile cloud scenarios for Windows Phone developers, through a set of services and tools that greatly facilitate performing common tasks involved in working with Azure tables, blobs and queues. This course, takes an in-depth and hands-on look at leveraging Azure storage services from a Windows Phone application, by exploring and building on top of the toolkit. Along the way, we introduce each of the Azure storage types, and we learn about the programming interfaces they expose and how to work with them directly and through the toolkit’s architecture.