Windows Azure Mobile Services- Intro

Introduction:

Integration of Windows 8 and Azure Services started with Windows Azure toolkit for Windows 8 , but then Microsoft renamed it as Windows Azure Mobile Services. So, now if you are planning to develop Windows Store Application using Windows Azure then you need to understand Windows Azure Mobile Services thoroughly.

As with Windows Azure Service , the Windows Azure Mobile Services enables developers to provision, configure, and consume scalable backend services.

If you are new to Windows Azure , don't get panic-ed , followin section is for you. If you already know Windows Azure please skip the next section.

Windows Azure: In few lines.

Windows Azure is nothing but a cloud-computing platform  from Microsoft that can:
a.  run applications
b. store data in the cloud.
So that the development team can do their work without worrying about the underlying infrastructure and can concentrate more on application development rather than thinking about how to manage the operating system.

Following are a few capabilities of Windows Azure than can help a developer/development team as such:

 a. Availability of on-demand compute services,
 b. Availability of on-demand storage services,
 c. Availability of on-demand  networking services,
 d. Content-delivery capabilities.


Since , the scope of this article is not to explain or introduce you to Windows Azure as such , so I am restricting my explanation here.

We are discussing about blending Windows 8 and Azure together.

In case you don't know what a Windows 8 App is , you can read the following section , else skip it.

Windows 8 apps in few lines:

Windows 8 apps are the applications created with metro style UI , or using Microsoft UI Design guidelines that can be brought on to Windows 8 platform irrespective of whether a PC , a tablet , a mobile or any other type of devices. You can refer to my blogs on developing Windows 8 app to get a holostic knowledge on development of these apps.

Now, wgen Windows 8 Apps are used with Azure , the architecture of the apps as such changes a little , instead of depending on SQLite ot text file as storage  , the app connects to Microsoft Cloud Services and gives you a feel of an app that is mobile and is always connected.

Architecture of Windows 8 App with Azure:

This type of Architecture basically takes advantage of Windows Push Notification Services.

Following is a basic outline of how the architecture of Windows 8 Cloud connected app looks like:

 We will look at the Windows Notification Services in next article.