Querying a database on Windows Phone 7 using WCF

I had a request to create a proof of concept app on how to connect a Windows Phone 7 Silverlight application to a SQL Server database hosted on a PC. Since the Windows Phone API does not allow the developer to connect directly to the SQL Server, one has to create a WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) service that will expose operations to interact with the database. Let’s do this! Source: http://sdrv.ms/XUd0CN

1. I’ll be using Northwind database for the sample, and I’m including it as part of the files for download. You can use any database you want, of course. First, let’s create a web service application. We’ll be using the ASP.NET empty website template for this matter.

2. Let’s create a new ADO.NET Entity Model, in order to use the powerful Entity Framework to do our job. We call it NorthwindModel

3. We generate it from database, choose to include sensitive data in our connection string, check the table “Customers” and check “Pluralize or singularize generated object names”.

4.We create a new *Silverlight-enabled” web service in our project. We call it “NorthwindService”.

5. We write the code for the web service, that queries the database (via the Entity Framework mechanisms) and returns all Customer objects

6. We press F5 and our service is ready! Don’t close the browser or stop the project, as we need it to be alive so that we can reference it via our Windows Phone project.

7. Let’s create our mobile application. We create a new Windows Phone Silverlight application

8. We create a ListBox (giving it the name “lst”) to display ContactName and City of the customers that we will fetch from the WCF service

9. We’ll use the “Add Service Reference dialog” so that our application can “see” the web service. We copy the url of the service from the browser, and enter it into the dialog.