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If you're using Windows, you're no stranger to Windows services, but do you know how to write one of your own? In this article, you'll learn not only how to build your own Windows service, but how to build a client with which to control it.

We continue our series on the Internet of Things by building a connected device—a smart thermostat—and wiring it up to the Windows Azure Service Bus.

In the last 12 months, Windows Azure has undergone a dramatic transformation. It’s gone from “What is it?” to “We need it!” in very short order. Much, if not all of this, can be attributed to the stellar leadership of Scott Guthrie and his team. It should come as no surprise the ASP.Net team, which includes all the goodies from ASP.Net MVC, Web API and SignalR to name a few, were and continue to be under ScottGu’s leadership. It’s another reminder of what the power of people (really smart people to boot), working together in furtherance of a common vision can accomplish. Today, Windows Azure is a manifestation of that accomplishment. Windows Azure is actually many things. It can host TFS, Windows (obviously), SQL Server as well as other non-Windows technologies like PHP, Ubuntu, Java, Node.js to name a few. Windows Azure also has the capacity to host “Big Data” and to be a full-fledged media server. One of the biggest catch phrases today is “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS). Though its virtual machine features, Windows Azure delivers this capability as well. For the full details on what Windows Azure can deliver, navigate to windowsazure.com.

This article focuses on how to provide a scalable, video streaming service with little or no upfront investment in hardware or infrastructure. We walk through a step-by-step process using Windows Azure Media Services and a Web-based client. For consumers, a Facebook implementation of these technologies will be presented.

Getting a map on the Windows Phone screen is easy, but rotating it so that north on the map is actually pointing north is another matter entirely. Charles Petzold describes how he used the Bing Maps SOAP Service to get the results he wanted. The Motion sensor in Windows Phone 7.5 consolidates information from the phone’s compass and accelerometer to create a rotation matrix that describes the orientation of the phone in 3D space. Recently I began pondering how the phone’s orientation could be used in combination with Bing Maps. I anticipated a quickie mashup but the job turned out to be rather more complex.

Charles Petzold finishes his Windows Phone 7 e-book reader with a Web service that gets the catalog file from Project Gutenberg, and a Pivot control to display a search screen and a list of downloaded books.

Learn how using Windows Azure to sync corporate databases lets you scale to many more end nodes than are possible with direct-to-database synchronization.

When Sean Iannuzzi was asked to secure a Web service for an existing database and Web application, he saw the benefits of using OData, but he didn’t think it was secure enough. See how he developed his own custom implementation with extra security.

You already know that GPS is used extensively in a wide variety of mobile devices in order to track delivery and service vehicles—or any other mobile fleet. This kind of application is not as difficult as you may at first think. Find out how to use Visual Studio to create a GPS tracking app, with maps, that runs on Windows Mobile Pocket PC devices.

With WebForms, each ASP.NET page's rendered output includes a <form> element that performs a postback to the same page whenever a Button control within the form is clicked, or whenever the user modifies a control whose AutoPostBack property is set to True. This model simplifies web page development, but carries with it some costs - namely, the large amount of data exchanged between the client and the server during a postback. On postback the browser sends the values of all of its form fields (including hidden ones, like view state, which may be quite large) to the server; the server then sends back the entire contents of the web page. While there are some scenarios where this amount of information needs to be exchanged, in many cases the user has performed some action that requires far less information to be exchanged. With a little bit of forethought and code we can have the browser and server exchange much less data, which leads to more responsive web pages and an improved user experience.

Over the past several weeks I've been writing an article series on accessing server-side data from client script. Rather than rely solely on forms and postbacks, many websites use JavaScript code to asynchronously communicate with the server in response to the page loading or some other user action. The server, upon receiving the JavaScript-initiated request, returns just the data needed by the browser, which the browser then seamlessly integrates into the web page. There are a variety of technologies and techniques that can be employed to provide both the needed server- and client-side functionality. Last week's article, Using WCF Services with jQuery and the ASP.NET Ajax Library, explored using the Windows Communication Foundation, or WCF, to serve data from the web server and showed how to consume such a service using both the ASP.NET Ajax Library and jQuery.

In a previous 4Guys article, Creating an Online Boggle Solver, I built an application to find all solutions in a game of Boggle. (Boggle is a word game trademarked by Parker Brothers and Hasbro that involves several players trying to find as many words as they can in a 4x4 grid of letters.) This article takes the lessons learned in Using WCF Services with jQuery and the ASP.NET Ajax Library and uses them to update the user interface for my online Boggle solver, replacing the existing WebForms-based user interface with a more modern and responsive interface. I also used jQuery Templates, a JavaScript-based templating library that is useful for displaying the results from a server-side service.