Windows Azure Mobile Services

The Azure Mobile Services platform has some great new functionality that works toward making this a total solution for a mobile / web application hosting environment.  Some of the new features include:

• iOS support – enabling you to connect iPhone and iPad apps to mobile services
• iOS Push Notifications via APNS (Apple Push Notification Services)
• Facebook, Twitter, and Google authentication support with mobile services
• Blob, Table, Queue, and Service Bus support from within your mobile service
• Sending emails from your mobile service (in partnership with SendGrid)
• Sending SMS messages from your mobile service (in partnership with Twilio)
• Ability to deploy mobile services in the west US region

Scott Gu had an article on his blog this morning outlining the expanded support for iOS on the Windows Azure Mobile Services platform. This post runs through how to create a web service that sends push notifications to iOS devices using a native Objective-C SDK within Azure.

This will go a long way toward making Azure the gold standard platform for hosting a web application that interacts with all devices.  By combining this technology with the Windows 8 mobile platform to leverage your Azure-hosted RESTful services, you are able to offer a wide range of device support with a large amount of shared infrastructure and service instance.

If you would like to walk through a tutorial using the push notifications, Microsoft has published one that covers all of the basics. You can view the first tutorial here and follow it up with this one.