Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

I have a great news for people that develop application for mobile devices. Windows Azure Mobile Services officially support Android. Until now we had support for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and iOS. From this perspective, in this moment Windows Azure Mobile Services support the most commons operating systems for mobile devices. You can use the same Mobile Service endpoint for different clients. This means that you can have only one Mobile Service that can be used by a Windows Phone 8, a iOS, Windows 8 and Android application in the same time. If is your first time when you hear about Mobile Services you should know that is a service that provide support to create the backend of your application. Storage, tables, authentications, custom scripts, batch operation and many more are supported by default. This means that you can focus on your client application without worrying about the backend. Everting is exposed as a REST API and can be accessed directly using REST API of using clien...

Yesterday, December 17th, the 7th number of Today Software Magazine was lunched. In this number I wrote an article about how a backend of a mobile application should look like. To be able to create a backend for a mobile application I presented Windows Azure Mobile Services. Windows Azure Mobile Services come with a mechanism build in to store data, authenticate users, push data to devices and define custom scripts on the server side. There are two things that are very interesting: Build in support for iOS and Android, not only for application developed for Windows Store and Windows Phone JavaScript used for define server side script You can find the article here .

Part 2 In last post we saw how we can create a table using Mobile Services to store GPS position. We discover how we can setup who can make each CRUD operation on our table. In this post we will continue to see how we can write data and retrieves data from our table. We already created an instance of MobileServiceClient. From this service we will need to retrieve an instance to our table using GetTable method. After we have a reference to our table (IMobileServiceTable) we will be able to execute any kind of request over our table: IMobileServiceTable tableService = mobileServiceClient.GetTable<Location>(); await tableService.InsertAsync(location); await tableService.Select(l=> { … }); await tableService.UpdateAsync(location); I think that you already notified that all the methods are async. Also, you don’t need to manual create a new instance of the IMobileServiceTable. This is handled by the Mobile Services component automatically. Do you remember how we setup our tabl...

Part 1 When we need a backed to store data for a mobile application Windows Azure Mobile Services can be a great solution. Let’s imagine that we need to develop a mobile application that need to store the GPS location of our client. For this purpose we can develop a complicated solution, with a backed that exposes this functionality as services. Also we will need an authentication mechanism that will add another layer of complexity. All this functionalities are already supported by Windows Azure Mobile Services. In this blog post we will see how we can configure. First step is to configure our Windows Azure account to have Mobile Services active. In this moment Mobile Services is in the preview, because of this before creating a Mobile Services you will need to sign up to this preview. From the new command of the portal you will find a link to the sign up page for the preview. The activation time period is very short. Each Mobile Services has a unique name, which will identify our...

What do you think about Windows 8 and Windows Store? It has a great potential and is a place where people with good ideas can develop application. Usually when you develop an application you also need a backend. A place where authenticate users, to store data and so on. Windows Azure comes with a solution that can freaks out any kind of backend developer – Mobile Services Why is so great? A lot of backend stuff that you need in a normal mobile application is built in. Let me give you some example: Authentication infrastructure for Windows Live, FB, Twitter, Google and more coming soon Push notification Store data on the server Custom scripts on working with server data And this is not all. Imagine that you develop an application for iOS. Could you integrate Mobile Services from Windows Azure? YES, you can. In this moment, after you setup your mobile service you can download a sample application for Windows 8 App, Windows Phone or iOS that contains all the settings for your acc...