A- Xamarin + Azure
Meeting of Azure with Xamarin is both interesting and productive to know. With Xamarin and Azure every C# developer is full-stack mobile app developer. Their joint effort allows developers to build applications in their favorite language. Now they can simply leave behind the platform-specific languages and can share a single codebase across the front-end and back-end- entirely in C#. This all they can do from within Visual Studio or Visual Studio for Mac.
Azure allows developers to build engaging and high-performing applications quite faster. It helps in integrating and scaling your application and therefore adding and testing new application features becomes quite easy. Developers can power their applications using push notifications, authentication, data syncing and many other services in just a few lines of code.
With Azure’s unique Hybrid Cloud Solution you can write applications and can deploy anywhere. You can easily access any data source in public clouds, private clouds and Azure’s unique Hybrid Cloud Solution.
Here we have collaborated few value added services which Azure has to offer to Xamarin. Go ahead with the information collected for you.
B- Azure Services For Xamarin App Development
1. Cognitive Services By Azure for Xamarin
Azure has to offer varied cognitive services which can be used in the mobile application development process. It offers set of 21 new APIs called Microsoft Cognitive Services. Instead of dealing with the complexities which come from machine learning, Microsoft Azure offers simple APIs which handles common use cases. These can be speech recognition or facial recognition in an image. Such APIs can be broken down into five main categories like vision, language, knowledge, speech, and search.
Microsoft Cognitive Services comprises of a set of APIs, SDKs, and services which help in making intelligent application by adding various features like speech, facial recognition, and language understanding. Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services even offers emotion API which is for anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, contempt, surprise and sadness.
2. Azure Application Services
Azure application services helps in developing faster and powerful application for any platform or device. Microsoft Azure offers you with high productive application development. You can easily integrate Azure App Services into your current frameworks, languages and tools and therefore accelerates the development. Developers can quickly build, deploy and manage powerful web, mobile and APIs using single back end. You can even build standards-based web apps and APIs using Java, Node.js, .NET, PHP, and Python. Azure with its enterprise-grade data center network, security and compliance level helps you in building and hosting your applications with great confidence. With broad range of components, certified vendors and broader open-source developer community offered by Microsoft you can easily find and use what you need to get your work done.
The Web Application feature of Microsoft Azure App Service allow developers to quickly build deploy and manage powerful websites and web applications. Along with web application, Microsoft Azure also gives Mobile Apps feature using which you can rapidly build engaging cross-platform and native apps for iOS, Windows, Android or Mac. Also, you can store application data in the cloud, send push-notifications, add custom back-end logic in C# or Node.js. You can also quickly build and consume APIs in the cloud using your choice of language. You can use Azure Cloud Services and can take advantage of cloud to enhance your integration solutions.You can develop, package and deploy powerful applications and services to the cloud with Azure Cloud Services. A cloud connected mobile application will always use one or more services in areas like authentication, storage of structured data, push notifications, storage of unstructured data and invocation of Custom Code.
3. Azure Blob Storage
With exabytes of massive scalability and capacity, Azure blob storage easily and cost-effectively stores from hundreds to billions of objects. One can easily store any type of unstructured data like images, videos, audio, documents and much more. With blog storage, you do not have to worry about servers and racks every day. Blob storage handles all your unstructured data, scale it up or down as per desired need. You simply do not have to manage all this stuff. Just pay for what you are using and save money. Azure offers great consistency as whenever an object is changed, with superior data integrity it gets verified everywhere, therefore, ensuring having access to the latest version. Azure offers multiple blob types. You can block, page and append blobs which give you lot of flexibility to optimize your storage according to your needs.
4. Azure DocumentDB
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB is a new NoSQL document database service which supports JSON and Javascript. It supports SQL syntax to query JSON documents, therefore, allow you to leverage existing SQL knowledge which you are working with a NoSQL database. It is a fully managed and schema-free JSON document database service which uses Javascript and HTTP REST API.
DocumentDB is available only as an Azure service which offers elastic scale for both throughput and storage. Microsoft also offers a free one month trial for new Azure accounts. DocumentDB allows you to use server-side Javascript to add user-defined functions in your SQL queries. Also, DocumentDB allows you to create stored procedures and triggers in JavaScript. An SDK enables you to work with the following languages and platforms like .NET, Client-side Javascript, Node.js, and Python.
5. Azure Functions
Azure Functions is a solution for easily running small pieces of code or functions in cloud. It processes events with a serverless code architecture. You can simply write just the code you need for the platform without even worrying about the whole application or the infrastructure to run it. Azure functions can even make the development even more productive and therefore you can use your choice of development languages such as C#, F#, Node.js, Python or PHP.
With Azure, you just have to pay only for the time your code runs and rest leave on Azure in order to scale as needed. Functions also support NuGet and NPM, so you can use your favorite libraries.It also offers integrated security by protecting HTTP-triggered functions with OAuth providers such as Azure Active Directory, Google, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft Account. It offers flexible development as you can code your functions right in the portal or you can set up continuous integration and can deploy the code using Visual Studio Team Services, Github, and other supported development tools.
C- Wrapping Up
There is wealth of information which Microsoft Azure and its services has to offer to Xamarin App Development. Team of seasoned technical architects of Xamarin App Development offers consultancy services by understanding your business needs and ensures your application goes through a smooth development cycle.
For more in-depth application development process on each of the services stay tuned to the Xamarin Blogs from Algoworks Resource Centre.
Also, don’t miss to grab a little more knowledge on Xamarin here:
Why Should Enterprises Use Xamarin for App Development?
Geolocation In Mobile Apps Using Xamarin
Development Of Native UI Mobile Applications Using Xamarin Forms
Xamarin And iOS10 App Development – What’s New
References: xamarin, developer.xamarin, adrianhall.github.io, microsoft, todaysoftmag, walkingtree.tech, azure.microsoft, drdobbs, docs.microsoft
Rachit Agarwal
