Learning Windows Azure Mobile Services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 by Geoff Webber-Cross

A short, fast and focused guide to enhance your Windows 8 applications by leveraging the power of Windows Azure Mobile Services

Overview

Dive deep into Azure Mobile Services with a practical XAML-based case study game
Enhance your applications with Push Notifications and Notifications Hub
Follow step-by-step instructions for result-oriented examples

In Detail

Windows Azure is the most opted for cloud technology, and is getting better each day. With the increasing number of users of Windows Phone and Windows 8, the necessity for a good robust cloud service to support the apps is increasing. Windows Azure Mobile Services is a set of Windows Azure hosted services that are designed to quickly build, deploy, and manage a mobile web-connected app.

Using this concise and to-the-point guide, you will be able to utilize Windows Azure Mobile Services with your Windows apps and know how best to integrate them with the backend capabilities that Azure provides.

We start with setting up the portal, choosing a subscription, and taking the first steps into integrating services into our applications. From here, we explore security, scripts, and push notifications and finish with the requirements for store submission and how to improve user experience.

The book discusses different service permission options and demonstrates how to use an authentication provider in our applications. Scripts are examined throughout the book with examples of modifying table methods, creating custom APIs, and making push notification requests. We also explore how to extend scripts with NPM packages and manage them with Git version control. Push notifications is a major feature of Mobile Services so this subject is thoroughly examined with examples using the native PNS libraries and scaling up notifications with Notifications Hub.

Learning Windows Azure Mobile Services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 is a great companion for anyone who is building or thinking of building an application that needs centralized data storage or push notifications.