Earlier Posts
In my early testing I wanted to always seed my Local Database. By default the db was only dropped and reseeded if you changed the models. There is a simple code change to do this.
10 Apr 2014
You can very easily have your app Poll for Live Tiles. What is cool about that is that you don’t have to register for Push Notifications and you can easily show updates to all users of your apps with low overhead. Also, the user never has to run your app for Live Tiles to update.
09 Apr 2014
09 Apr 2014
Debugging on your Live Service is bad! For instance if you are breaking in the debugger while one of your users is trying to get data, that call will likely timeout. Also it is difficult to isolate an issue if multiple unplanned requests are coming into your service. If you have some things you need to test or debug with your .NET backend, you can easily publish your .NET Backend code to a ‘Staging’ service to do your debugging.
I was using the Windows Azure Mobile Services .NET (Preview) Backend and wanted to see the HTTPS traffic. I found the best way is to use Fiddler and modify the application so it will send traffic through the Fiddler proxy. By default Fiddler will not catch the localhost traffic so you need to do a little trick to get IIS Express (Cassini) to work with this setup (ref: http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/observe-traffic/troubleshooting/notraffictolocalhost ).
Listing for a PowerShell Script to backup Windows Azure Mobile Services scripts and configuration information. I will get something more complete up on the Script Repository this next month! This also assumes you have set your subscription active using Windows Azure PowerShell. See How to install and configure Windows Azure PowerShell for more information.
There were no detailed instructions for this and I ran into some problems when following our tutorial for this so here are my super easy to follow instructions. I did this on Windows 8.1 64bit OS installed in a Hyper-V VM. These instructions are for the 64 bit environment (I did not try the 32 bit).
I confirmed Windows Azure Mobile Services was able to communicate with GCM (Google Cloud Messaging) and had no errors sending the notification to GCM. But how could I see how this got or didn’t get to my Android Emulator?
25 Nov 2013
I ran across an issue where I wanted to convert an Image in a Windows Store app to grayscale and could not find a great example. So… here is one for you to try!
30 Oct 2013
I had an interesting case that I want to share in the event anyone else experiences this problem. In this case a Symantec certificate stored on a SafeNet USB dongle was being used to sign a Windows Store app in Visual Studio. The signing was failing. Visual Studio reported: “SignTool Error: An unexpected internal error has occurred”. These guidelines were followed and everything seemed in order:
I needed to popup a WebView and wait on an event before continuing. There really was no illustration on how to do this so here you all go!
The preferred way to talk to the database you are using for you Windows Azure Mobile Services is through the REST APIs and by using the Clients we supply for you. The reason you should go through the REST APIs is to ensure you are hitting the Scripts you defined in your Mobile Service. I had a case where someone wanted to directly connect to the SQL Azure database in the backend to list data in a grid view. The call would fail with this error: “invalid object name‘tablename’” where ‘tablename’ was the name of the table in the SQL Azure database.