Tailspin Surveys–Windows Phone 7 edition

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Here’s a high level overview of the major components we are planning for Talspin Surveys.

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A few notes:

  • The backend is essentially an extension to Tailspin surveys as described an implemented in the Windows Azure Architecture Guide (Part 2).
  • There’s now a new services head (an OData/JSON API) that is used by the devices.
  • Tailspin also has a “mobile website” to enable phone users to subscribe and download the app from the marketplace.
  • There are new survey question types that are specific for the phone:
  • Photos.
  • Voice.
  • GPS location.
  • Users of the app can subscribe to surveys that match a specific criteria (e.g. “surveys that take less than 10 min” or “surveys from “Adatum”).
  • Tailspin backend will use push notifications to advertise new surveys that match the user selection criteria.
  • The application architecture is pretty straightforward:
  • It will operate always regardless of network status.
  • The app always goes against local storage (isolated storage files).
  • A separate task will send results back to the backend service and download new surveys available to the user.
  • This task is likely to be a background thread in the same app.
  • UI will follow all WP7 guidelines as documented here.

We are very close to have a first early release on Codeplex.