Developing with Azure Mobile Services?

Question

What is currently the "best" way to develop a back-end system in Azure Mobile Services?

Specifically, what tools are available? From what I've seen, most examples just go to the Management portal and manually add a few lines into the script window. This is worse than using just Notepad, and doesn't have any concept of version control...

Is there any way to make a project in VS 2012 that contains all the Node.js code that will run in the Azure Mobile service? Is there a way of fully running that code on a local development environment that mimics the Mobile Services?

I need to have server-side code with much more complexity than is shown in most of the Mobile Services samples or documentation that I've been able to find.

I have a web site, and a Win 8 Store App that need to authenticate against, and access relatively complex data structures from a back-end database. The solution being pushed right now all seem to include Mobile Services at the center of it, using simple REST against raw tables, but all the examples are too simple to be useful.

Can someone point me to a "real-life" sample of using Mobile Services, and a "mature" way of developing and testing such a system using the tools in Visual Studio?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Why you have no other option than the Management portal is really beyond me. It seems very awkward for a C#/.NET developer to go back to Notepad style programming with console.log() debugging.

What I would love to see is some Node.js entry points that you could connect to a regular C# assembly which could fulfill the request (as in ASP.NET MVC or Web API) having the full .NET Framework at your disposal.

What I could see as a possible architecture is to have:

ASP.NET MVC hosted on Azure --- writes processed data with logic to ---> Azure SQL DB <--- reads from --- Azure Mobile Services ---- bridge to ---> Mobile devices

Or

Cloud Worker Role on Azure ---- crunching/processing ----> Azure SQL DB <---- reading/writing raw data ---- Azure Mobile Services ---- bridge to ---> Mobile devices

You can use the Mobile Services facility for mobile devices facilities, scheduling and push notifications with limited code and do most of the coding in a managed .NET environment.

Answer 2

The AMS (Azure Mobile Services) along with Azure has advanced dramatically since this post was written and the replied answers.

Some of this stuff still holds true. If you have a ton of node.js written not in the Azure cloud portal, you will want to copy and paste to the portal online, custom api calls section and even perhaps sql backend tables for CRUD operations.

The hope for C# developers is that it is NOW in preview mode in which YOU CAN skip node.js and build everything without node.js very shortly... Some bugs to work out, but in 6 months this will be fairly solid.

I had questions and issue and a guy named Carlos carlosfigueira was very helpful. Azure Mobile Services - Getting more user information

Answer 3

Josh covers unit testing server-scripts here: http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Unit_testing_Mobile_Services_scripts_Day_7_.aspx

In this tutorial, he uses the Mocha testing framework for JS (id TDD mode) and walks through an example for testing an INSERT script that encrypts the value of a particular property (text) and a read script that decrypts it (value is encrypted at rest in SQL db).

You can also find aggregation of links and tutorials here.

Answer 4

I would suggest that you build this solution using Windows Azure Mobile solutions especially it supports the Node JS NPM right now, which means you can create the API you want on the Windows Azure using the Node JS NPM and can work with it using WAMS easily. have a look on the following link it will help you understand what I want to say more.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/06/14/windows-azure-major-updates-for-mobile-backend-development.aspx

For the Client I also suggest that you build it using SignalR which is designed for cases such yours where real time applications require a lot of transactions from the server side.

http://www.asp.net/signalr

you can also find more details about how you can integrate both of them in the following link: http://hhaggan.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/signalr-node-js/

I hope these help you, let me know if you need anything else.

Answer 5

For running locally, the mobile service has the same Kudu environment available in azure websites, so you can browse to https://your_service_name.scm.azure-mobile.net If you navigate to the Debug Console from the top nav, you can download everything running in the site/wwwroot folder.

You can run this nodejs project locally (On windows only if you require the SQL Server npm package). Your code is in App_Data/config/scripts. If you replace the downloaded content with your current local git working copy, you can develop and debug locally, and then push changes as usual.

Answer 6

Tools I use:

1. Eclipse with JS environment (or any nodejs IDE).
2. Git
3. Postman

Steps:

1. Enable source control to your azure mobile service.
2. Pull to your local and create a eclipse project with the source.
3. Make changes and push.
4. Test with POSTman

This procedure allows me to develop really fast and eclipse tell me the common JS errors. But it has obvious downside:

1. No debugging (I use console.log)
2. The project ended up with a lot of commits (its hard to use git for proper source control)

Answer 7

I just did a blog post on running Azure Mobile Services locally: http://www.mikelanzetta.com/2014/09/running-azure-mobile-services-locally/ - basically it interrogates the API and starts up express, and allows you to run mocha yourself locally. It's a bit cleaner than pulling down the full wwwroot from the scm link, and I found using my local runner as a git submodule made it easy to work with (and easy for me to use VSO for managing my tests).

Anyway, for actual development, I use the Git integration and WebStorm - it automatically figures out the tasks in my local Gruntfile and makes it easy to run and test. For once it's deployed, Postman is helpful.