For today’s weekly Windows Azure community call I decided to demo Azure’s new Mobile Services Feature. Microsoft provided a surprisingly easy tutorial to follow and I was able to get up and running within 30 minutes with an application that saves to Azure storage and authenticates using Windows Live (is it called that anymore, I’m confused).

Here is a high level overview of the tasks and where I hit bumps along the way.

Things you’ll need:

  1. Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 installed
  2. Mobile Services SDK
  3. Live SDK

OK. Now that’s out of the way. Here we go. Down to business.

  1. Register your application here.

There are apparently two ways to register apps. Using the link above provided all the settings and denoted my app as a ‘Windows Developer Preview Application’. Just going through the regular process seemed to omit that suffix from the name but most importantly certain settings were unavailable within API Settings. Most notably the Package SDI and Restrict JWT Issuing.

  1. Enter basic application settings.

Make sure that the publisher name (CN-foo) that you enter matches what is in your project’s *.appxmanifest file! I made this mistake and got a vague error from the authentication attempt.

  1. Update redirect domain in your application settings.

  2. Update the client secret in your mobile services settings.

  3. Modify your code to use the boilerplate authN code provided by Microsoft.

Microsoft has a nice TODO project that helps speed things along from a storage stand point. The download is accessible from within your very own Mobile Service. Just click ‘Create a new Windows 8 application’ to expand and show you the full details.