Getting started with Azure Mobile Services

One of the most prominent and interesting aspect of Windows azure is the mobile services. Azure offers various cool offerings with the mobile services. Push notifications, remote data access, multiplatform support etc. The best part is, it’s all free for developers. In this post we will look at how can we start using the mobile services for various platforms.

For simplicity, this post comes in two part. The first one deals with the hectic of setting up a mobile service, while the second part goes a bit further and actually uses the service in a Windows Store application.

While writing this post I am assuming that you already have a developer account in Azure. If you don’t have one, create one, it’s all free.

Creating a Mobile Service

Navigate to the Azure portal. Click on New in the Application bar below and choose Mobile service.

When you choose “Create” a dialog will open, asking for settings for the new mobile service you need to create. Configure the settings as per your requirement.

I have chosen to create new Database for my new “neeleshService” and I want the service to be hosted in Azure East Asia’s server as it is closest server to India, therefore, would be faster.

Next is the database configuration.

Once the service is created, it started showing in ready state in the mobile service portal.

Click on the newly created service and choose Data.

It sounds weird if a service won’t do database operation, saving information for example. If you remember while creating the service, we also created a 20 MB database. Let’s now use it and create a table, Comment, in it.

Click on “Add A Table” option and type in the name of table.

Once created, you can see the table in the portal.

By default, azure will create 4 columns for you. ID is the primary key column for the entries.

Click on the table and add a column to it by choosing the add column option.

Name the column as “usercomment”. Once the column is created, you can see it in the portal.

This is how we can set up a mobile service with a Database linked with it. In the next post we will look at how we can consume the service in a windows store application.

Happy Reading!!