Last week I had the opportunity to talk about an amazing Windows Azure feature during the Windows App Day. WAMS aka Windows Azure Mobile Services is a newer Windows Azure feature, released somewhere in September 2012.
It is a technology that allows you to quickly build mobile applications for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and even for iOS and also Android in the future.
Every application needs data, an API, authentication, authorization and custom server side logic. All of this is nicely integrated into WAMS, and can be highly reused on all these different platforms. One of the killer features of all these platforms, Push Notifications, to make your applications more alive and more interactive, is build in and easily available for you to use in any of your applications.
Preparing the session really took a lot of time this time. The subtleties of notifications were not easy to figure out and to fully implement without any issues. Now that I played with it a lot of times, it feels natural and it will be one of the components I’m looking forward to implement in my own apps.
Abstract:
People are getting more and more connected and moving away from computers to using more mobile devices than ever before. Tablets, phones, slates are becoming the new computers.
All these devices and applications also need data, synchronization, security and much more. The broad reach, the number of devices and apps and the big amount of different platforms existing today, are pushing the needs for scalable and high available solutions running on a solid cloud platform, like Windows Azure.
One of the killer features of Windows Azure is WAMS, the Windows Azure Mobile Services. A Solid platform to connect cross platform devices and to open up a big set of features needed to build mobile applications.
In this session we will give you an introduction to WAMS, show you its true power and demonstrate how it can be used on multiple platforms to have one common way of connectivity. Managing and opening up your data to mobile users, while keeping the flexibility of validation and queries. Securing your applications by enabling authentication and authorization and by allowing the user to do single sign on or to use his favorite identity provider like Live, Facebook or Twitter. Enabling standard communication means like email and SMS, directly from your own application. And last but not least, enriching applications using push notifications, to send information from server to client and to notify users about new content.
Conclusion:
Again a great topic to talk about, and another amazing technology to demonstrate. I’m looking forward to talk about this subject more next year 
In less than one hour I was able to build a Windows 8 app from scratch, adding back-end data to it available through an API and stored on SQL Server in the cloud. Extended with server side validation and custom server logic. Secured by twitter authentication and data security by server side authorization. And ofcourse a final topping of push notifications.
Amazing no? It sure is