Xamarin.Forms App Push Notifications with Azure Notification Hubs

Rukesh Shrestha .NET, Azure, Cloud, Mobile, Tutorial, Xamarin 2 Comments

Push notifications are a vital feature for today’s enterprise mobile applications. Why are they so important? They allow the business to communicate with its users without requiring the application to be in an open state.

Xamarin.Forms allows developers to create user interfaces in XAML with code behind it in C#, which then renders as native controls on iOS and Android platforms.

In this blog, we go through a step-by-step tutorial for setting up and configuring push notifications on Xamarin.Forms applications using Azure Notification Hubs. Let’s dive right in.

Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms and Azure Mobile App Service

Jeff Hopper .NET, Azure, Cloud, Development Technologies, Mobile, Tutorial, Xamarin 2 Comments

Earlier this month my friend Ryan introduced us to Getting Started with Xamarin Forms and Prism. In that post, Ryan started a mobile application to display blog posts which he called SimpleBlog.

In this article, I would like to continue that demonstration by adding a back-end server to persist and share these blogs. This will be accomplished using Azure’s Mobile App Service which falls within its free tier services.

Yes, you did read that right: you can spin up an Azure account and have access to try out many of Azure’s features. For instance, the example I am going to walk you through today can be hosted indefinitely without costing you anything, and to that, you could add nine more web, mobile, or API services. See https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/ for more information.

There is no way I am going to be able to cover all the possibilities available in an Azure Mobile App service, much less what Azure has to offer. My intent in this post is to help “whet your appetite” on the possibilities by giving a quick overview of just two great frameworks that play great together: the Microsoft.Azure.Mobile.Client mobile framework tied to an Azure Mobile Apps Service….