Video: Connecting Android up to Windows Azure Mobile Services (includes setting up the Android Development Tools)

Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it really easy to build a cloud backend for your Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows 8 and HTML/JavaScript apps. The backend is self-managing in that Microsoft does all the service management for you so you don’t have to worry about the daily management of the service, keeping it in good order and worrying whether it’s just about to fall over.

This video shows you how to create a simple cloud backend. I knew nothing about the Android Development Tools and had to do a bit of digging to find out how to get them to work with the mobile services project (namely – how to get support for Android SDK 4.2 and API level 17 in to latest tools which only support 4.3 and 18 by default).

If you’re already familiar with the ADT, you probably only need the first 4-5 minutes of this video to get you started. But if you’re not, this video will save you a lot of time in trying to find out how to get things working.

This video can also be viewed in higher quality on Channel 9.