Tailspin Surveys–Windows Phone 7 edition

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

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.