Getting to Know Azure Mobile App Cont.

Microsoft Azure Mobile App has recently gone GA (General Availability) and has definitely captured my attention. Mobile App is a tremendous accelerator that enables us to go from an idea to a functional prototype quickly. Then, we can continue to build on that initial investment to create a robust production ready app. Finally, this post is all about using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to build and publish apps to HockeyApp, so that we can test and assess quality before our apps make it to our favorite app Stores.

Streamlining the Build

Using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) we can easily configure your builds without having to mess around with XAML. I used an awesome post about continuous mobile deployment with VSTS as a guide to make the build/publishing pipeline for my project.

Getting to Know Azure Mobile App

Microsoft Azure Mobile App has recently gone GA (General Availability) and has definitely captured my attention. Mobile App is a tremendous accelerator that enables us to go from an idea to a functional prototype quickly. Then, we can continue to build on that initial investment to create a robust production ready app. Finally, using Visual Studio Team Services and Release Management, we can publish our apps to our favorite app Stores.

Why Mobile App

These are reasons why you should consider Mobile App on your next project. They certainly contributed to my agility throughout my adventure.

• Build native and cross platform apps
• Connect to your enterprise systems
• Connect to SaaS APIs easily
• Build offline-ready apps with sync
• Push Notifications to millions in seconds
• Automatically scale-out to handle any incoming customer load.
• Build low friction server-side REST services.
• Benefit from a simplified data access layer.
• Deliver functional prototypes with minimal effort.

How do You Version Packages?

This topic seems to come up regularly. And is usually a friction point for teams because many of us do this differently. In an attempt to standardize versioning and to remove this undesired friction I decided to promote Semantic Versioning (http://semver.org/).

Using OData (5.5.0) NuGet Package in Windows Azure Cloud Services That reference the Windows Azure Storage NuGet Package

A few months back I wrote a post entitled “The ODataLib Dependency Issues in the Storage Client Library for .NET are Now Resolved”. In this post I was stating the fact that the dependency issues has been resolved.

Today I decided to experiment with this, because by fear of more problems, I’ve been restraining myself from upgrading to the latest ODataLib NuGet packages.

The Windows Azure Storage NuGet package doesn’t have a good history of playing nice with the latest ODataLib NuGet package and this caused quite a few problems for my projects in the past.

So, I checked in all my code and gave it a go!
To my greatest surprise, nothing blew up!

Thanks to this new  Windows Azure Storage NuGet package I can finally work with all the latest NuGet packages used by my solution.

With this short post, I wanted to thank the Windows Azure team for fixing this bug. You guys made my day!

My Code Has Moved! It’s Now Available on NuGet!

I have decided to centralize my code  on GitHub. As of today, you can find the code from my Windows Azure posts, bundled in Brisebois.WindowsAzure.

https://github.com/brisebois/Brisebois.WindowsAzure

I also packaged my code and made it available through Nuget.org 

https://nuget.org/packages/Brisebois.WindowsAzure/ 

To install Brisebois.WindowsAzure, run the following command in the Package Manager Console

PM> Install-Package Brisebois.WindowsAzure

Issues can be logged on GitHub

https://github.com/brisebois/Brisebois.WindowsAzure/issues

Using Quartz.Net to Schedule Jobs in Windows Azure Worker Roles

I was looking for a way to create Cron jobs in Worker Roles on Windows Azure and I found Quartz.Net. A Nuget package which is still being maintained as of January 2013. The documentation wasn’t great and was mostly out of date. Furthermore the API seems to have evolved quite a bit over time. The framework seems quite capable and very flexible. I’m barely using any of its potential at the moment! It has schedules and triggers, with a better understanding of its functionality, I would probably grant it more responsibility in my workflow.

The following is an example that demonstrates how I was able to successfully schedule jobs.