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