Recently I have been working on a new talk for speaking engagements.  The topic is Push Notifications which is something which come to the forefront more and more for app development.  As this happens the various OS players have continued to enhance the Push experience within their platform.  The talk was aimed at explaining Push Notifications, their importance, and how to support them in a cross platform way.

Having used Parse in the past I immediately defaulted to using it for the Android and iOS side of my talk, it seemed logical. I was midway through my presentation when I attended a talk at Chicago .NET Developer Group which focused on using Azure as a backend storage for Windows 8 apps.  Now, I had heard about Mobile Services and knew that Microsoft had been working to develop this service.  But I had heard it was limited to only Apple outside of the Microsoft stack and that it was still a work in progress; the talk, done by Adam Hoffman, showed me how wrong I was.

I know from experience that doing push notifications, even on Windows Phone, is not easy and requires a lot of knowledge about XML and the networking stack; so imagine my shock when I realized that Mobile Services could not only handle this for me for my Windows apps but also my iPhone and Android apps.  That with a single line of JavaScript run through node.js on Azure Mobile Services I could easily send notifications to any platform I desired.  And finally, imagine my glee when I saw the setup and just how remarkably easy it was.  Needless to say, my jaw about hit the floor and I promised Adam to check out Mobile Services over the weekend to see if I could fit it into my talk.

Forget fitting it in, I dont think I will ever use Parse again.  Over the course of one weekend I went from being behind in the development of my demo to being ahead of schedule.  I was able to completely overhaul my demo apps architecture and replace it with something that is very clean and consistent.  And, most importantly, I got consistent functionality from Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone apps.

Using the node.js + data table integration point, I was able to write a simple JavaScript script file which handles all of my push notifications for all of my clients, the details for those clients is stored elsewhere as the one shortcoming of the Mobile Services REST API vs Parse is the lack of an endpoint for sending a Push Notification via REST; I am sure the team will address this, in the meantime we have the Storage Table REST API which I was able to use in its stead.

The other nice thing is since Mobile Services uses SQL Azure as the storage mechanism you can access it with SQL Server Management Studio.  In this way you can view your data and interact with it in a much more robust way than with Parse (I cant speak to other services like Urban Airship or Pusher).

I do not want to give away the details of my talk on this post, that will  happen after its debut at Chicago Code Camp on April 27th, but I have to be honest.  What Microsoft is doing with Mobile Services is truly amazing; to think they even took the step of using GCM (Google Cloud Messaging) for Android Push Notifications when most Android devs either arent aware of it or dont use it shows an impressive amount of foresight.

If you havent checked out Mobile Services, do yourself a favor and do it.