Device farm in Azure - azure

Does Azure has the capability to setup a device farm like AWS Device Farm to test Android, iOS, and web apps on a massive collection of real mobile devices.

Azure does not provide testing services for mobile apps. There are 7 best device farms to test your iOS and Android applications.

You may use Visual Studio App Center Test (formerly Xamarin Test Cloud), it supports some frameworks and language, you may find yours within it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/test-cloud/

Related

Notifications in my .netcore 2.1 MVC deployed on Azure Linux WebApp

My application is .Net Core 2.1 MVC. I am also using jQuery.
This application is deployed as an Azure Linux WebApp.
The users can see this website from desktop-based browsers like IE, Chrome, Safari etc. as well as from Iphone, IPad and Android mobile devices.
My backend's database is Azure MySQL 5.7. I have created a notification table in MySQL. The backend populates this notification table. The notification records may be applicable to a specific user or a group of users.
If a user is online, they should see the live updates (count and notification text).
Is Azure SignalR service or Azure Notification Hub the right choice for implementing this?
Push notifications are supported for iOS, Android, Windows Universal, Windows Phone, Kindle, Android China (via Baidu), Xamarin (iOS and Android, Chrome Apps, and Safari.
Notification Hubs is primarily designed to send notifications to mobile apps. It does not provide email or text message capabilities. However, third-party platforms that provide these capabilities can be integrated with Notification Hubs to send native push notifications by using Mobile Apps.
Notification Hubs also does not provide an in-browser push notification delivery service out of the box. Customers can implement this feature using SignalR on top of the supported server-side platforms
Hope I answered your question, Gist is basically you need to use both for implementing your solution.

Azure Mobile App obsolete?

We are currently running Azure Mobile App backend + Xamarin app as client and it works fine. Soon, we will be creating new mobile backend.
However, it would seem that, according to this
https://github.com/Azure/azure-mobile-apps-net-server/issues/227
azure mobile apps is abandoned? Even Adrian Hall has moved to AWS? This begs the question, should I create mobile backend using WebApi 2 and deploy it as usual Azure Web App, use Azure Web App Mobile App?
Namechanging from Azure Mobile Service to Azure mobile app was confusing enough,there is also complete lack of up to date documentation for Azure mobile app SDK except from couple of examples.
I'm a PM in App Center team at Microsoft. I'd like to share our continued commitment to Azure Mobile Apps as our team own it. We are doing user research right now to understand the evolving needs for these services and plan to build the next generation of Azure Mobile Apps as part of Visual Studio App Center.
While we're working on the roadmap, we are fully committed to supporting Azure Mobile Apps including support for the latest OS releases, bug fixes, and documentation updates.
This is a similar pattern to what we are doing with HockeyApp and Xamarin Test Cloud. App Center is the next generation for those services and as we roll their functionality into App Center, we are re-imagining key developer workflows and adding new features, as well as integrating them into an end-to-end CI/CD solution that helps developers ship better apps faster.
I arrived here while looking for guidance on Xamarin.Forms offline sync feature in Azure Mobile Services.
Turns out Azure Mobile Services has been superseded by Azure App Service Mobile Apps. Fine, I'll look there for offline.
Turns out Azure App Service Mobile Apps has been superseded by Visual Studio App Centre. This supports auth, data and push so I went looking for offline again.
Turns out App Center Mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) offering is being discontinued so MS can focus on DevOps.
So in short if you want mobile backend service don't bother looking for MS to provide you a stable platform as a service, instead focus on building your own on their core products and hope they don't abandon those after a couple of years.
I hope these notes help sign-post the changes and demystify things a litte.

Azure App Service, Mobile Apps or Api Apps; what is the difference?

I have reading about the new Azure offerings and trying to figure out what is what. The documentation I have been finding all over seems to have more information about the frameworks that are not valid anymore like this one here. Most of what they talk about at 4.8, 5.23, 12.13 into the video are no longer valid.
So far what I understand is that Mobile Services was offered in the past. That will soon be discontinued and App Services will take over. App Services are the top level services that contain Api Apps, Mobile Apps and Web Apps. Is this correct?
I am confused as to why we have Api Apps and Mobile Apps. Don't they do the same thing? And now that we have Web Apps in addition, are they only limited to UI related applications? The only simple thing to understand and one that has no similar other offering is the Logic app. This seems to be something that can only be done on the Azure portal. Visual Studio has no project template for it. Is there something that needs to be installed for creating logic apps in my visual studio only?
Also, in Visual Studio 2015 what is the difference between the Asp.Net Web Application project template under the WEB node and the CLOUD node? They both seem to be holding the same templates within.
Why do we have Azure Mobile App and Azure Mobile Service right under the Cloud node like here below..
..and also after selecting Asp.Net Web Application
On the face of it, both look the same. Are there any subtle differences that one needs to know about?
Also, why are all these options also not available for Asp.Net 5 templates? With all the changes happening is it a good idea to put apps developed under the latest versions to production?
Thanks for any pointers.
Azure Mobile Apps are the next version of Azure Mobile Services. Azure Mobile Services has been deprecated, and you can't provision it on new subscriptions. Mobile Apps has a lot more features over Mobile Services. To learn more, see I use Mobile Services, how does App Service help?.
Mobile Apps, Web Apps, and API Apps are all essentially the same thing, they just have some extra features for building particular solutions. You publish each of them to an App Service Plan, which is the actual underlying VM that hosts your service.
Once you've provisioned one of these app types, you can publish a Web API to it, regardless of what app type it is. For instance, you can publish your API to a Web App or Mobile App. Once you've picked a particular app type, you aren't locked in, you will just see a slightly different UI in the Azure Portal.
Mobile Apps also have a Mobile Server SDK for Node.js or .NET. The .NET server SDK is an extension of ASP.NET Web API. It doesn't yet support ASP.NET 5, mainly because there is a dependency on the OData library, which doesn't yet support ASP.NET 5. However, Mobile Apps is under active development and will support ASP.NET 5. Unfortunately, we don't have a timeline to share, mainly because not all the dependencies are complete.
For Mobile Apps in particular, you get the features of client SDKs that support authentication, offline sync, and push notifications. The easiest way to learn about the offering is to follow the quickstart guide: Create a Windows app on App Service.
You can learn all about the SDK and try them out, even without an Azure Account. Here's documentation about the .NET server SDK: Work with the .NET backend server SDK for Azure Mobile Apps.
API apps have a few extra features like creating a metadata endpoint for you automatically, which you can then use to generate client library using Visual Studio.
Currently, only Web Apps and Mobile Apps have a demo experience available at Try App Service, but you can see the API experience if you use a Microsoft Account to sign in, and then manage the app in the Azure Portal. You will see all of the API app and Mobile App options in the portal.
Note that Web and Worker roles are part of Cloud Services, and are a totally separate service. To learn about the difference between these, see Azure App Service, Virtual Machines, Service Fabric, and Cloud Services comparison.
I just describe what is the difference between Azure App Service, Mobile Apps and Api Apps, hope it helps:
Web and Mobile Apps o Mobile Apps offer a mobile application development platform with a rich set of capabilities. Based on Azure Mobile Services, Mobile Apps provide developers with a comprehensive set of client SDKs including Windows, iOS and Android as well as multi-platform environments such as Xamarin and Cordova. With Mobile Apps, you can easily send push notifications to your app, add login, and store data in the cloud with offline sync to any mobile client.
With API Apps, you can select from a rich library of existing on-premises and cloud APIs as well as contribute their own APIs easily for public or private use by Logic, Web, and Mobile apps in Azure App Service.
Azure app service, is a solution for creating web and mobile apps, is a cloud services that unifies everything you need to quickly and easily create enterprise apps that run on any platform or any device.
Azure app service is composed of: Web Apps, Logic Apps, Mobile Apps and API Apps
There is no longer API Apps in Azure, there is now only Web Apps.

How to use one Mobile App connection in Xamarin across all applications

I'm currently creating my first application using Xamarin PCL(without Xamarin.Forms) and Azure Mobile App. What would be the best approach to use only one instance of MobileServiceClient across all applications? If it's not possible to use it from PCL, then is there any way to do it the same way, but only across iOS app?
If you're referring to code sharing when you say instance, the Azure Mobile Apps Client SDK enables you to do that. You can consume the SDK from your PCL and use your PCL from your platform targets/projects.

Monotouch - Windows Azure toolkit

I am working on an Iphone application which needs a direct access to Azure. I know there are toolkit versions exist for Objective C and Android. Is there any ported version of the toolkit exists for Monotouch?
There is no specific Azure SDK which is designed for MonoTouch and the Azure desktop binary are not compatible. If you decide to use MonoTouch, you would need to use WebClient API to create your own HTTP/HTTPS connection something similar to as described here, which could be comparative complex. On internet you may find some experiment level code to use Azure services and MonoTouch application so you may be by your own to try to get things working.
If you choose Objective C then you can use iOS SDK for Windows Azure which is far better solution. I personally will not use MonoTouch to develop application on iOS devices, if I am heavily dependent on Windows Azure Services, instead I will choose iOS Windows Azure SDK to connect Azure Service through native code.
Check this out as well: MonoTouch connect to Azure ACS, Azure SQL / Azure WCF

Resources