I’m going to start the year by dissecting a typical business scenario which will demonstrate how the use of Windows, Windows Phone and Azure can be plugged together to quickly deliver a line of business solution. Throw in a bit of Xamarin and a web front end and you have a solution that will enable employees to use any device they choose in order to access the software.
The first thing to cover is the scenario, which in this case is going to be a property inspection tool that could be used by a property manager to do periodic property inspections required under most rental agreements. At first glance this appears to be a tool that is specific for the real estate industry but as we’ll see there are a number of components that make it similar to any task, defect or issue tracking system:
– Property managers will have a number of properties assigned to them to manage
– Properties will have a history of inspections which may include images and/or videos
– Property information, and perhaps most recent inspection, needs to be available offline (just in case there is no internet inside a property being inspected)
– Inspections need to be able to be created, edited and submitted from a mobile device
This will probably do for the time being; as we go we may introduce other elements to demonstrate the use of various platform components. What’s interesting to note at this point is that properties can be switched out for projects, and inspections for tasks, if this scenario were a task/issue/defect tracking system.
At a high level let’s discuss the major components:
– Mobile devices – Naturally as .NET developers we gravitate to what’s easiest so we’ll include Windows and Windows Phone applications based on the universal app template which uses a shared code project to prompt reuse. However, we shouldn’t neglect the other platforms so we should include iOS and Android projects, using the Xamarin tooling. Our business logic we’ll abstract into a portable class library (PCL) to attempt to give us maximum reuse.
– Services – Azure Mobile Services will give us the raw scaffolding to stand up a SQL Server backend with services exposed to surface data to our mobile applications. These services support synchronisation which we’ll use to give the mobile applications offline support.
– Blobs – Azure Blob Storage will be used to store the images and videos collected as part of the solution. Whilst the service tier will be used to control access to Blog Storage (by issuing Shard Access Signatures) the upload will be done from the mobile applications directly into blob storage
– Authentication – As this is a line of business solution we’d prefer users to not have to remember another set of credentials. To this end the solution will use Azure Active Directory (AAD) to authenticate users and grant them access to the software. The users can be synchronised from the corporate AD into AAD so as to maintain a single set of credentials for any user.
– Web application – An Azure Website will be used to provide desktop and mobile solution for those unable to use the mobile applications. Whilst this could go directly to the SQL Server backend, it will in fact be routed via the service tier to ensure a common authentication pattern and usage model for the data.
– Scheduling – A scheduler will be setup in Azure for use by the solution in order to schedule particular jobs or operations to be carried out. For example the periodic generation and sending of reports.
– Push Notifications – When new data is available, push notifications can be sent out to the mobile applications to either alert the appropriate user, or perform a background synchronisation of the new data.
I’ll use this post as a reference for the components that I’ll be discussing in the coming posts. The components aren’t in any particular order and the posts won’t focus on individual components, rather how they connect together and what you need to know to get them to work together.