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I am trying to figure out why I should use Azure. At the moment, I am using a generic web hosting provider to store my users accounts and data. It works pretty ok for me. I am a very small hobbyist so Azure may not be something for me(?). Anyhow, I now have a problem - I am wondering if Azure might be able to help me with. For my apps and sites, I usually have some kind of user account and data storage. For a new WP7-app, I am making I want to store the data online so I can access and modify it from my web site as well. Now I would like to remove the requirement for the user to create another new account for this little app. I realized that the user of the phone already must have a live-account (because its a requirement for using WP7). Could I use this somehow in combination with Azure to store the data specific to every user and then also access it from my web site?

Mamta D
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Andreas Zita
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This question is really less about Windows Azure, but more about authentication (and SSO)

Here are a couple options for using existing authentication credentials with WP7 and WIndows Azure (or any other hosting environment). Including LiveID, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, etc.

Here's a quick description of some:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/eugeniop/archive/2011/03/24/authentication-in-wp7-client-with-rest-services-part-i.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/eugeniop/archive/2011/04/02/authentication-in-wp7-client-with-rest-services-part-ii.aspx

(also discussed here: How should I handle user identity for a Window Phone / WCF / ASP.NET MVC application?)

Community
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Eugenio Pace
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Yes, Azure can help you with that.

Have a look at this link:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-reasons-to-use-azure-for-your-cloud-apps/1282

Mamta D
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    Windows Azure also encompasses Azure Page, Blob, Table and Queue storage which is cheap for storage, but you get charged for storage transactions. SQL Azure on the other hand is essentially "SQL Server in the cloud". It's more expensive for storage ($10 per month per 1GB DB or $100 per month for a 10GB DB), but incurs no transaction fees. Chris Auld delivered a great talk at MIX 2010 on Azure Storage where he discussed Azure costing in some detail (search on http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX10). – Rich Turner Apr 14 '11 at 07:40
  • Thanks Richard, I guess I overlooked that. Have corrected my answer so that it would help others looking for similar solution. – Mamta D Apr 14 '11 at 16:52