Azure App Services Mobile Apps and a new One Dev Minute Video for Azure Mobile Services
Things have been quiet recently on my blog, but things have been far from quiet in the world of Azure Mobile Services.
First off, in the new Azure Portal, Mobile Services is looking a bit different…
Introducing App Service Mobile Apps
Microsoft recently unveiled a new group of Azure services, bundled collectively as Azure App Service. You can read ScottGu’s announcement here. This new preview service, which is targeted a enhancing web and mobile capabilities in Azure, is comprised of Web Apps, Mobile Apps, API Apps, and Logic Apps features. The cool thing is that these new features are highly composable and let you easily build-out your apps and reuse components and build-in connectors across both web and mobile, and to construct integrated workflows.
With the introduction of .NET backend and integration with Notification Hubs, Mobile Services was already headed this direction. The major change in going from Mobile Services to Mobile Apps (beside the portal and the component reuse) is that the authentication functionality has been moved out to a shared gateway that supports all App Service features. Note that App Service is only available in the slick new Azure portal, which uses “blades” and look like this:
This new service offering is currently in preview, and it seems like the feature positioning/messaging is still being refined. Yes, Mobile Services is still there and will be for a good while, especially since this Mobile Apps preview does not currently have parity with Mobile Services, in particular a lack of support for JavaScript (Node.js) backend and not yet having quickstarts for all major client platforms (the preview supports quickstarts for Xamarin, iOS and Windows).
You can get started learning more about Mobile Apps with these new topics:
A New One Dev Minute Video for Azure Mobile Services
The Windows folks have a developer education team dedicated to producing the classy-looking video series One Dev Minute series that is published on Channel 9. These videos focus on the cool stuff that you can do with Windows apps, and I was lucky enough to get to help create a One Dev Minute video for Azure Mobile Services to highlight push notifications.
Here’s the new video Connecting your app with Azure:
This video demonstrates how easy it is to use Visual Studio to connect to a Windows app project to Azure to be able to send push notifications to app users. It also conveys how you can then expand that same mobile service to support other platform apps, like iOS and Android apps.
Thanks to Ross, Kelly, Harry and everyone else that helped to publish this first-rate video for Azure and Windows.
Cheers!