Eric lippert - Amazon Web Services

Azure Mobile Services and Push
Notifications
Building ‘ZumoFakeTweet’
Azure mobile services step in and help developers by simplifying
the Web Service/Notification Server logic. Azure Mobile Services
provide the following for us:
1. An Entity Store for easy data access and storage. It uses Azure
SQL DB as its backing store.
2. A client side communication library so you don’t have to deal
with Raw HTTP Requests.
3. Secure Storage for App SID and Client Secret (these should
not be distributed with the clients).
4. Communication with WNS.
Configuring Windows 8 App, Azure Mobile Service
and WNS
1. We start off by Logging into our Developer Dashboard and
creating a new Application. To do so, you have to click on the
‘Submit an app’ menu item on the left hand menu bar.
This significantly eases our task of building and managing Push
notification service for our Mobile Apps.
The Use Case
Ideally we would like to build a Twitter client with push
notifications, but that is a non-trivial example that can nearly
span a book much less an article. So today, we’ll build a fake
Twitter application. Something, that is distantly similar to
Twitter, only if you look at it with a very obtuse angle. We’ll call
this app ZumoFakeTweet!
Application Design
It will be a simple app that accepts a User Name identifying the
user of the App. The premise of the App is to send out FTs (fake
tweets) and FDMs (fake Direct Messages).
FTs are pushed to everyone whereas FDMs are pushed to the
user whom we intend to send it.
2. Click on the App name and provide the name of your App.
If you already have an App that you want to add notification
capabilities to, select ‘Advanced Features’. We provide the name
‘ZumoFakeTweet’ and move on to the ‘Advanced Features’.
3. In ‘Advanced Features’ page, click on the ‘Push Notifications
and Live Connect Info Service’. This pops up a new browser (you
may have to re-login with your Windows Store developer
account credentials). The First Step here is to ‘Identify the
Application’. As you can see below, you can either do it via Visual
Studio or do some manifest file hacking later. We will create our
Windows 8 Store App at this point.
But First a set of Pre-Requisites
1. You’ll need an active Azure Account and even though Mobile
Services are in Preview and the first 10 are free, you’ll still need
an Azure SQL Database that may cost you depending on your
plan.
2. You will need a Windows 8 Developer account to follow
through with the Push Notification Setup and implementation.
3. Access to a Windows 8 machine with Visual Studio (Express
will do).
With the basic premise set, let’s look at the pre-requisites and go
ahead and build the Windows 8 Application.
4. To get started with the ZumoFakeTweet project, start Visual
Studio, select new Windows 8 Project and pick a Blank Template
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