As I discussed in my initial post there are a number of components that make up the property inspection tool. In this post we’ll start by creating the initial solution structure, create and add in the Azure Mobile Service, and publish the Azure Mobile Service.
Initial Solution Structure
A lot of blog posts will start by creating the Azure Mobile Service and then use the template projects provided on the home page of the newly created Mobile Service. Sometimes this isn’t an option and you want to be able to integrate a Mobile Service into an existing application. For this reason I’m going to start with a new project creating Visual Studio using the Blank App Universal template.
This will create Windows and Windows Phone projects, with a Shared code project to handle files shared between the two applications.
Creating the Azure Mobile Service
The next step is to create the Azure Mobile Service. This can actually be done by right-clicking on the Mobile Services node in the Server Explorer window in Visual Studio but I’m going to have to go to the management portal to download the initial project for the Mobile Service anyhow. To create the Azure Mobile Service, navigate to the Azure Management Portal and select New >> Compute > Mobile Service > Create from the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Complete the setup wizard – make sure you select the .NET backend.
After completing the setup wizard, a few moments later the new Mobile Service will be available. However, before I can use it I need to publish the set of services – you can think of what I’ve done so far as just setting up a placeholder for where the services will live.
Publishing the Mobile Service
To publish the Mobile Service I expand out the Get Started section on the home page of my newly created Mobile Service, and click on the Download link. I save the downloaded zip file, unblock and then extract the zip file.
I then copy the service folder (in my case realestateinspectorservice) into the solution folder of the solution I created earlier. Back in Visual Studio I then add the existing realestateinspectorservice project into the solution.
Right-click on the services project and select Publish. Select Microsoft Azure Mobile Services as the publish target
At this point if you’re not already signed in, you’ll need to sign into you Azure subscription with your Microsoft Account in order to select the previously created Mobile Service:
After selecting the Mobile Service to publish to, click OK and then the Publish button. This will cause the project to be compiled (and any required NuGet packages to be downloaded) and then published up to the Mobile Service. This may take a few minutes the first time as all referenced libraries will have to be copied up. However, future publish operations will be significantly quicker as they are by default differential.
After publishing the Mobile Service I can test that it’s operational using Fiddler (or curl etc) to simulate a GET request. I need two pieces of information: firstly the url of the Mobile Service I created. This can be found either in the Output window of Visual Studio at the end of publishing the Mobile Service, or from the dashboard pane of the Mobile Service in the Azure portal. The second thing is that I need one of the two assigned access keys. This again comes from the Azure management portal by clicking on the Manage Access Keys button in the toolbar at the bottom of the page. This key needs to be added to the request as the X-ZUMO-APPLICATION header. The following images show the request and response samples
So this gets me part of the way through setting up my solution – the next thing to do is to connect the Windows and Windows Phone applications so that they can call out to the Mobile Service…..