The start of Footy News on Windows Phone 7

So here’s a quick recap of where we are:

• We’ve got a service running on the Azure platform that trawls the net for the latest footy news via various sporting RSS feeds
• Back end storage in the cloud via SQL Azure for the footy articles
• Hosting in the cloud via Windows Azure for an ASP.NET website to check the service is running and that our service is actively grabbing the latest articles  http://footy.cloudapp.net

The next step is to build a WP7 app that will read from SQL Azure and display the footy news.  My initial prototype simply lists the articles on the left hand side and allows the user to select and swipe to the right to view the article on the web. 

Here’s a screencast of the quick prototype written in Silverlight:

The start of the Footy News WP7 Prototype from Steven Hollidge on Vimeo.

Azure

I’ve written a little application that trawls the internet for footy gossip so that users can have a one stop shop for all the latest rumours. 

The solution is pure C# and Azure. The website is hosted on Windows Azure, the data is stored on SQL Azure and the service that trawls the RSS feeds is running on Azure.

Here’s a screenshot:

You can hit the live site by clicking on the following link:  http://footy.cloudapp.net/

The application reads various sports RSS feeds and stores the title and links to the articles within SqlAzure (note: I’ve hidden some sensitive data):

To view one the feeds click on the this link from The Mirror newspaper in the UK:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/rss.xml

Seeing as I’ve got this week off work I’m thinking about knocking up a Silverlight application to deploy to WP7 (Windows Phone).  The tricky part is I don’t own a Windows Phone so testing might be tough.  I’ll give it a go and write a blog post on my learnings.  Here’s hoping Mango is as good as the Microsoft sales team say it is!