In addition to the tremendous amount of power available in today’s mobile computing devices, the abundant availability of network connectivity provides the ability to create extremely rich and robust apps that take advantage of resources in the cloud. However, many mobile app developers often are constrained by limited time and financial resources and cannot afford to invest large amounts of either to set up an elaborate back-end to support their apps’ needs. Windows Azure Mobile Services aims to fill that need by providing a low-friction service infrastructure that can be used to support the needs of most mobile apps, including data storage and manipulation, authentication and authorization, connection to notification services, access to messaging services, custom server-based job scheduling, all within a framework that can be scaled to meet an app’s growing needs. Tapping into this framework allows developers to focus on their app development and achieve the cloud-connectivity within their apps. This session will introduce how Windows Azure Mobile Services addresses these concepts, with an emphasis on consuming the services from within Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps.

Windows Phone 8 is Microsoft's newest operating system for today's modern smartphones. This session will introduce the fundamental concepts that developers will need to know in order to develop applications targeting the rich features offered by this newest mobile platform.

Multi-Targeting is about reusability. It is about writing code once which can be reused across different frameworks. This reduces development and maintenance time giving a boost in ROI. This session would start with discussion about various historical multi-targeting options with Microsoft Development technologies. We would see how portable class libraries supports this idea. The main focus would be about efficiently writing portable class libraries using new Visual Studio tooling features.