Azure Mobile Services Quickstart for Visual Studio Cordova
Since nearly the GA of the service, Mobile Services has had support for a PhoneGap quickstart app project in the Azure Management portal:
Just click the magic Download button to get your customized PhoneGap project. Now, while PhoneGap and Cordova are pretty much interchangeable, you can’t really (at this point) open a Cordova project directly in Visual Studio by using the Apache Cordova Tools for Visual Studio 2013 installed.
Personally, I’m sold on Visual Studio as an IDE for Cordova/PhoneGap projects (as you may have noticed in my previous posts and my MSDN Magazine article). One of the things that makes this tooling for Cordova great is that it gives you the ability to create or add a Mobile Service to your Cordova app, just like you can do for a Windows app. However, to really follow along with our Mobile Services tutorials, you need the TodoList quickstart. You can build the whole thing based on the HTML tutorial and use the Add Connected Service wizard in Visual Studio, like I show in my article. However, to make everyone’s life a little easier, I published a version of the TodoList quickstart as a Cordova project in Visual Studio:
https://github.com/Azure/mobile-services-samples/tree/master/VSCordovaTodoListQuickstart
To get this working, just get the URL and application key from the Mobile Services portal (below):
And replace the appUrl and appKey placeholder values in the index.js code file in the project:
Hope this makes everyone’s life a little easier using Cordova with Visual Studio and our Azure tutorials.
Cheers!