Figure 1 shows a high-level view of the architecture of the extended Surveys application.
There are two, top-level components in the Surveys application. The first is the back end that Tailspin hosts in Windows Azure and that enables subscribers to create, publish, and analyze surveys. This back end is described in the book, Developing Applications for the Cloud on the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform, available on the MSDN® website (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff966499.aspx). The second component, which is the focus of this guide, is a
mobile client front end that runs on Windows Phone 7 devices and that enables surveyors to collect survey response data and send it to the back end. This guide also describes the changes to the back-end cloud application that were necessary to support the mobile client.
Tailspin is launching the mobile client application to support new features in the Surveys service. These new features include the following:
- The capability for surveyors to be able to filter available surveys on different criteria
- The ability to collect rich data from survey respondents, such as the respondent’s location, voice recordings, pictures, barcodes, and physical measurements captured from the device’s sensors, as part of the survey
- The capability of the application to notify surveyors that new surveys are available