Azure Mobile Services: Tips & Tricks

Introduction

Creating mobile apps? Want to add a cloud based backend service? Don't know where to start? You're at right place.

In this article, we'll see how easily we can create an Azure mobile services powered app for windows. We'll be using JavaScript in our mobile service for server-side business logic because we don't have to write CRUD operations for it. You can also use .NET if you want to write your own server-side business logic.

Pre-Requisites

• Download Visual Studio 2013
• Sign-up for Azure

Steps

• In the management portal, click on +NEW icon on bottom left. Click on COMPUTE, MOBILE SERVICE, then click CREATE.
  
  
  
  
• After clicking create, a dialog will appear. Give your mobile service a name in URL. Choose JavaScript as your backend. We'll create a new database in this example. You can also use any existing database if it lies in the same region.
  
  
  
• After completing the above step, you'll have to specify the database settings. Make sure you select the same region here. Here's the following screenshot for reference.
  
  
  
  
• It will take 2-3 minutes to get your mobile service ready to use. Click on it, you'll see a quickstart page. Click on Windows and then create a new windows app.
  
  
  
  
• After clicking on create a new windows app, you'll see three steps to follow. Hopefully you've already done with first step. Complete other two steps and your sample app (powered with azure mobile services) will be downloaded.
  
  
  
  
• Let us do some testing. Open solution file of Visual Studio and run your app on local machine. Add few tasks and close the application. Run it again and you'll notice that the previous data will automatically populate in your app. That's the magic of Azure mobile services.
  
  
  

Summary

We've simply created a cloud based backend for an app using Azure mobile services. You may have noticed that we've done this in few minutes; that's the power of Azure. You can also do other stuff i.e. push notifications, authentication, etc. with Azure mobile services.

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