This is a software-development kit (SDK) for the creation of Windows Phone 7 (WP7) applications that leverage research cloud services not yet available to the public. The primary goal of this SDK is to support the efforts of Project Hawaii, a student-focused initiative for exploration of how cloud-based services can be used to enhance the WP7 experience.

You can download the SDK here.

What Is Project Hawaii?

Innovations in WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) and WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network) technology continue to create connections throughout our world, and smartphones are gaining acceptance for both professional and private use. We foresee that the vast majority of applications that run on these platforms will rely on services provided by the cloud.

As part of Project Hawaii, we are investigating how we can use the cloud to enhance our use of mobile devices. Our goal is to foster the creation of a set of cloud-enabled mobile applications and associated support services to help us understand the systems and networking infrastructure needed to create the next generation of applications. The MAUI project and a university engagement effort are also part of this project.

Our current platform consists of a Windows Phone 7 smartphone and several cloud services, including Windows Azure for computation and data storage, Bing Maps for mapping services, and Windows Live ID for user identification. We are also using some prototype cloud services.

Source: Microsoft Research, via @alvinashcraft