This Toolkit is now deprecated and is now

superseded by Windows Azure Mobile Services

The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone provided developers with the first iteration of support for building backend services for Windows Phone apps using Windows Azure.  The main areas of feedback we received from mobile developers was that they wanted a turn-key set of services for common functionality such as notifications, auth, and data.   Windows Azure Mobile Services directly reflects this feedback by enabling developers to simply provision, configure, and consume scalable backend services. The downloads for this toolkit will be removed on the week of Feb 1st 2013 and all future improvements will be channeled into Windows Azure Mobile Services rather than this toolkit. 

To get started with Mobile Services, sign up for a Windows Azure account and receive 10 free Mobile Services.

The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone project template for Visual Studio can generate a project, which is fully configured to provide read only access to an OData service on top of a SQL Azure Database.

In order to accomplish this, you need to have an active subscription with SQL Azure Database; furthermore, the project template needs to acquire some information about your SQL Azure Database Server.

In the project template wizard, you will use the Database Administrator user, since Entity Framework 4.1 Code-First requires database administrator privileges to create the model database. However, you may want to change this in applications deployed to production environments.

Retrieving your SQL Azure Server Name

1. Go to the Windows Azure Platform portal at https://windows.azure.com.
2. Log in to your Windows Live account.
   
3. At the Windows Azure Platform portal home page, click New Database Server on the ribbon.
   
4. To create a server, select your subscription on the left pane. Click Create on the Server ribbon.
   
5. Select a region from the Region drop down list, and then click Next. The location determines which datacenter the database will reside in.
   
6. Enter an administrator account name and password and click Next.
   
   Note: An administrator account is a master account used to manage the new server. You should avoid using this account in connection strings where the username and password may be exposed. The password policy requires the password to follow certain rules.
   
7. Click Finish to create the new server. You will configure firewall rules later on.
   
8. Finally, the new server information, including Fully Qualified Server Name, is shown.
   
   Note: The fully qualified domain name of the server uses the following format:
   <ServerName>.database.windows.net where <ServerName> identifies the server. You must use the ServerName you have just created later on the Windows Phone Application.
9. Expand the subscription node located on the left pane, and then click the server name you have created. The Server Information page allows you to perform basic administration of the database server.
   
10. The Firewall Rules allows you to specify a list of IP addresses that can access your SQL Azure Server. The firewall will deny all connections by default, so be sure to configure your allow list so that existing clients can connect to the server.
    
    Note: Changes to your firewall settings can take some time to become effective.

You now have a database server created and ready for this application. This database can be connected to from anywhere in the world.

You should use the user name and password from step 6 and the Server Name from step 8 to configure the application generated by the project template.