Android Developers Welcome to Azure Mobile Services

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Approximately six months ago the Azure team released the Azure Mobile Services. The one thing missing all along has been support for Android. This has changed and now the cloud service offers a complete suite of services and tools for four platforms:

This is a very smart strategy from Microsoft that enables Azure to play a central role in the architecting of current and future mobile solutions regardless which platform you app targets, addressing specific aspect of mobile applications like data access, data validation, query paging, user authentication and authorization, as well as notification, scheduling of jobs, etc.

Windows Azure also offers a trial account for Android developers (all developers for that matter). You can find tons of info about documentation for client libraries and server scripts,  if you have questions you can count on an army of other developers providing answers through the Azure forum, There are two Android sample apps to get you started:

  • Tic Tac Toe Leaderboard 
    • demonstrates how to make a simple leaderboard that is stored in Mobile Services and displayed in the application, and
  • Feedback
    • shows an easy way to put a feedback form into an Android application to capture feedback and store it in Mobile Services

You can download the SDK directly from here and follow future open source enhancements from github.

Beyond Android support after the video under THE TOOLS DEPARTMENT see a full list of programs and resources available to any developer interested in also targeting Windows Store or Windows Phone 8 .

 

This 7 mins tutorial gives you an quick view of this new Android capability.

Download high quality video here.

Want to take it for a spin? Check the tutorials here.  

THE TOOLS DEPARTMENT
free/trial tools for developers

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  • Think blue sky with Azure free trial

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