Windows Azure Mobile Services adds new support for APNs push notifications

A few weeks ago, I published a blog post about some improvements to Windows Http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13357.html ">azure Mobile services." One of these is to add a C client SDK to allow IOS developers to easily use mobile services to process data and authentication. Today I am excited to announce several improvements to our IOS SDK, most importantly our new support for pushing notifications through the APNS (Apple push Notification service). This makes it very simple to push notifications to your IOS users from the Windows Azure Mobile Services script.

Push notifications via APNs

We provide two complete tutorials that will take you step-by-step through Setup and configuration steps to enable the APNs (Apple Push Notification Service) of your Windows Azure mobile service application, including all necessary steps to configure your application to push through the Apple IOS configuration Portal:

Once you have configured your application on the Apple iOS configuration portal and uploaded the APNs push certificate, you simply use the Windows Azure management portal to upload your APNs push certificate to the mobile service:

Click the "Upload" button under the push (push) tab of your mobile service to browse your local file system and locate/upload your exported certificate. In addition, you can choose to use the sandbox (dev) or product (PROD) Apple service:

Now, to send a push notification to your client from within the Windows Azure Mobile service, just the following simple lines of code:

This will enable Windows Azure Mobile services to connect to the APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) and send notifications via Devicetoken to the IOS device you specify:

Check out our reference documentation to learn more about how to use the new Windows Azure Mobile Service APNs object to send push notifications.