How to convert an ASP.NET/PushSharp project to Azure to send push notifications?

Question

I've been using ASP.NET and PushSharp to send push notifications to my iOS app clients with the simple following code (after certificate configurations etc):

//ASP.NET + PushSharp
AppleNotification notification = new AppleNotification(PushToken).WithAlert(message);
broker.QueueNotification<AppleNotification>(notification);

This worked perfectly on isolated hosts running classic IIS/ASP.NET but now I'm moving towards Windows Azure. When I try this code on Windows Azure, notifications sometimes fail to send, and restarting the website (Standard mode) helps. However, since this is an unreliable approach I've decided to move to Azure's Notification Hub service. I've created the hub, uploaded my certificates, started coding but I couldn't find the equivalent of my previous code. I don't need to broadcast messages to all users, I need to send a push notification to a single device, given that I have the push token. I've looked at Windows Azure ServiceBus Push Notifications APNS Architecture but the link provided at the answer is extremely confusing and I couldn't understand it. How can I, simply push a message to a push token on Windows Azure? Do I have to use notification hub? (I don't use a VM) Any simple approach is welcome, pure ASP.NET/PushSharp-based approach is preferred as I don't need to change my whole codebase.

Answer 1

I'm not sure what kind of object a PushToken is. The way Notification Hubs work is, rather than providing a one-to-one messaging model (where you must identify each and every recipient of the message, whether that is by channel, device token, or registration ID), it provides a tag-based model. However, this does not mean that tags can't be unique to individual users, and in fact you can used just about any token as a tag.

This is a new model, unlike Azure Mobile Services or direct use of APNS, so it's not likely to be directly portable from your existing code. But, in my opinion, the Notification Hubs model is simple once you understand tags. It supports native payloads (constructed by the server that is sending the notifications) and template payloads (where the template is constructed by the receiving device and provided to Notification Hubs at registration time, and then parameters in the template are supplied by the server when it sends the notifications to the templates).