I've seen similar posts but most are for consulting companies who work with clients so the situation is slightly different for us.
We have an onsite developer preparing to design a Windows Metro App to interface with our system. This app will be 100% unique for our business and would serve no public person any purpose. We will be designing this app for our sales team (8-10 users) to use out in the field so as you can tell it is only associated with our business. I believe people have been referring to this as a LOB app. I've seen posts about publishing to the windows store or using a "side-loading" process but one is meant for consumers and the other is meant for enterprise publishing which is way overkill for us.
Can someone please assist me with our options as a small business to publish private apps and deploy them to our own equipment?
I'm open to using the Store but obviously wouldn't want just anyone to be able to download & install our app.
The easiest way for you would be to hide the app in the store. Unfortunately this is only available for Windows 10 apps, not for Windows 8.1!
Is Windows 10 an option for you, maybe? In the developer dashboard you can choose to hide the app but you can access it with a direct link.
Related
I have a Win32 application written in VB6 that uses an MS Access database as its data file.
I have about 30 clients who use this application. Each currently has it setup in their local network. Some clients have a Terminal Server for staff to access their network remotely.
A number of my clients are inquiring about the possibility of using the application in the cloud.
I am considering the possibility of ultimately making the application web based in some form, however that will take many months to do. So, in the meantime, I am looking for suggestions as to how clients could run this application in the "cloud".
Would it be possible to run it using Microsoft Azure in some way?
I am also wondering whether I could rent a Virtual Private Server myself, and then set it up to allow multiple clients to connect to it (with each using their own individual data file). My main question around this option is whether there would be additional license costs for users who need to connect (eg. like the old Terminal Services "Client Access Licenses").
One function of the application is that users are able to "attach" electronic files (word documents, pdf's etc) to file notes. These "attachments" are stored in a subfolder of the data file location (ie they are not stored in the data file). So the solution must be able to support uploading local documents to the "cloud" service.
Any ideas would be most welcome.
Many thanks,
Rohan
You could try it with "Virtual Machine" feature of MS Azure.
Acces portal.azure.com
In the left navigation bar, choose "Virtual Machine"
Click "Add", type "windows" into the search field & press
Enter
Choose the Windows VM you want
Connect, upload your VB6 app & test it...
Please be inform that some Windows VMs require MSDN subscription or cost very much.
The Azure feature you are looking for is likely Azure RemoteApp. It allows for desktop applications to be installed in the Azure "cloud" and then used by users from any device using Remote Desktop Services functionality. This way you can control the environment where the application is installed, and not have to configure every users device; which is especially helpful with older legacy applications like VB6 apps.
https://www.remoteapp.windowsazure.com/en/
EDIT: Unfortunately on August 12, 2016 Microsoft announced they are discontinuing Azure Remote App. New purchases of RemoteApp will be discontinued October 1, 2016, and the service will be replaced with an offering from Citrix called Citrix XenApp Express.
I think you should simply create a virtual server for each of your clients. Do not create 1 virtual server for everyone, that will be a nightmare and very insecure for client data.
The clients would still just access over terminal services or Remote Desktop as they have before, just the server is now in the cloud.
Then you can bill each client for the what you are charged for their server.
RUN EXCEL/ACCESS DATABASE ON THE CLOUD WITHOUT PROGRAMMING!
I can solve your problem without using Azure or similar. We would first convert your Excel/Access database to a Progen4GL-based applications, which will then run on the cloud. See downloads on www.progencloud.com.
If you can, send us a similar Access/Excel file. We will convert it to a Progen4GL database that you can run the on the cloud with full read/write access. As Progen4GL reads in Access/Excel files without programming, we can do it for your for nothing. It takes only a few minutes for the to conversion to a Progen4GL Database. We will return it to you as a Cloud application. See Progen DataOWL on www.progencloud.com and try it yourself. You will need some help from us to run it on the Cloud as the website doesn't have full details.
Ravi Raizada raviraiz#aol.com
www.progencloud.com
A couple weeks back our Mobile App was migrated from the old portal to the new one and it hasn't behaved properly since.
Our main issues are:
We cannot access any logs files, the tab for Diagnostics logs stopped working entirely on Wednesday but even before that we never got any useful data out of this. When something goes wrong with our nodejs backend we can't find any clue as to what went wrong like we could in our old portal under the logs tab.
We are unable to access the FTP server entirely, it just won't let us login even though the credentials are correct and have been reset multiple times in attempts to get them working.
The server is throwing errors about not having enough disk space left even though we should have 53Gb to go (we're currently using 1.05Gb out of 55Gb)
Our deployments slots are not working at all, when we push our code to the deployment slot it just doesn't work, every request we make to the deployment slots tells us we're not allowed to do anything.
We are running a standard tier Mobile App server. The backend is in NodeJS, our CMS is in ASP.Net and our app itself is in Xamarin Forms.
The issues started after we migrated the server a couple weeks back from the manage.azure.com portal to portal.azure.com.
What can we do?
Edit:
We got through to Microsoft via the payed support plan which we're getting refunded because these are basic functionalities which don't work as advertised after the migration. I've got a call with them in about three hours to get things sorted, if I learn anything we can do ourselves I will update this post to share the knowledge.
This needs to be a support request to Microsoft.
If you can, open an incident with Microsoft Support. If you can't, post a question in the MSDN Community Forum. (We need to ask about particulars of your site and that isn't an appropriate topic for SO)
As the architecture of Mobile Apps is changed from Mobile Services, now the mobile apps migrate to Azure App Services.
Actually the Mobile Apps backend in Node.js is an expressjs project, and the mobile app sdk for node is a middleware of express. So the way for diagnostics and troubleshooting has changed from before we use Mobile Service. You can refer to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-service-mobile-node-backend-how-to-use-server-sdk/#Debugging for details about Debugging and troubleshooting for mobile services.
Additionally, we can leverage the Visual Studio Team Services editor as the section How to: Edit code in Visual Studio Team Services shows in the link above, we can monitor the output of the Mobile Apps backend application. E.G:
About your FTP issue, please double check your deployment Username, when we login to FTP server on Azure, we need to input the full FTP user name which is "app\username":
You can refer to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-configure/#enabling-diagnostic-logs for details.
We have built a simple mobile app that connects to ASP.net Web-API 2.
We would like to use Microsoft client SDK for it's offline sync support.
Now that Azure Mobile Apps support custom authentication we could actually take the leap.
I want to know out if the offline sync SDK absolutely requires us to use Azure Mobile App or Azure Mobile Services.
Microsoft documentation is full of how-to guides but does not explain what happens under the hood. The best I could understand, both are just OData rest API's and swagger for documentation.
Can the Azure Mobile Client SDK work with API server created on top of ordinary ASP Web-App, outside Azure?
What is it about the Azure Mobile App that makes the magic happen?
Vladmir,
On top of OData, in order to support features like soft delete, offline sync and others, the Azure Mobile Client SDK expects the server to implement a certain protocol. So although the answer to your question:
[does the] sync SDK absolutely requires us to use Azure Mobile App?
... is no, and in theory, you could implement your own API, but I would recommend against doing so, since (among other reasons) even if you manage to implement the expected conventions and behaviors, this will become a maintenance challenge down the road if you need to upgrade the client SDK to take advantage of bug fixes and/or new features.
The good news is that with the latest release of the Azure Mobile Apps server SDK, adding mobile capabilities to an existing ASP.NET Web API application is trivial, and you should be able to enable the scenarios you're looking for simply by adding the appropriate Table controllers. So you can just enhance your existing application and not have to develop and maintain the Azure Mobile Apps specific logic yourself.
About your last question, since both, the client and the server SDK are both open source and developed in the open, you can look at what what makes the magic happen here:
https://github.com/Azure/azure-mobile-apps-net-server
https://github.com/Azure/azure-mobile-apps-net-client
I hope this helps!
The answer for your first question: Yes the SDK can be used in any Server API you have since it will be your entry point to work with Azure Mobile Services.
The Azure Mobile app creates a mobile services instance which has push notifications and SQL tables to store all messages you would like to send with the capability to customize the message as needed. Also it creates a notifications hub instance under the hood to manage notifications for all mobile platforms. Azure mobile apps provide offline capabilities through native sync services between db on your devices and the server when connectivity is present.
Feel free to ask more questions to have a full understanding on How mobile apps works.
Hope this helps.
I have a WebAPI back-end for a mobile, and want to host it in Azure.
I am having a hard time figuring out the real differences between AMS and Websites.
All the articles I read about the subject talks about changes and benefits in general, and I want to understand specifically which new features AMS provides, and the benefits of hosting in AMS.
Authentication
In AMS I see the "IDENTITY" tab in azure portal. From what I understand, those 3rd party configs allow me to authenticate my users easily with google,FB etc. But this is just making the process more convenient and configurable via UI. In Websites, I can achieve the same functionality pretty easily using code from ASPNet.Identity and OWIN libraris.
Push Notifications
Again looking at AMS in the "PUSH" tab, I can see two mechanisms. The Notification Hub and 3rd party section.
The Notification Hub is nothing special to AMS, and I can get the exact same functionality when hosting in Websites.
The 3rd party section allows me to configure credentials to push services from Apple and Google (APNS,GCM...) and together with libraries in AMS namespace I can easily write code to communicate with those services.
But When hosting in Websites, in my back-end I can use open source libraries. For example, Moon-APNS to talk to APNS.
Scale
As far as I understand, both Websites and AMS allows the same scale functionality (One calls it Units and the other Instances).
Are there any big differences I missed?
Are any of the claims I made are incorrect?
It would be great if anyone could shed some light on the matter, specifically addressing all the 3 issues (Auth,Push,Scale).
That's a question I often get when I present Mobile Services at user group events.
For a .NET developer, there's nothing really special about Mobile Services since everything it offers, you can do it with a Website.
Mobile Services really shines for non .NET developers since you can have a complete mobile backend by writing scripts running on Node and Mobile Services abstract all the database and REST complexity.
I will likely get downvoted since I'll express a personal opinion but anyways: I see no obvious reasons for using Mobile Services if you're coding a .NET backend.
I think you are exactly the target customer for Azure Mobile Apps. You will get all of the power of having your own Azure Website (now rebranded as Azure Web App), with the additional convenience and client libraries of Mobile Services.
One feature of the client library that you may not have noticed is the cross-platform offline data sync capability. That's usually hard to build on your own, and we have an implementation that's conceptually consistent across all client platforms. (Plus, if you use Xamarin, you can share code between your client implementations.)
To be clear: Azure Mobile Services is NOT deprecated, and will not be until long after GA (general availability) of Azure Mobile Apps. Azure Mobile Apps is currently in preview.
The other big benefit of Mobile Services that you haven't mentioned is the client libraries for Android, iOS, Xamarin, and Cordova. If you already have a REST client library in your app and don't need to worry about multiple client platforms, then Azure Web Sites sound like a good way for you to go.
AMS by itself is built on top of Azure Websites. So you can actually implement everything in an Azure website that is available in AMS.
However, the good thing about AMS is that it allows you to quickly build the backend for a mobile app with CRUD operations, authentication/authorization and also provides client side libraries for different type of clients e.g., HTML, C#, etc. so we don't have to manually make the HTTP calls.
If you have need to implement the above functionality in Web API, it is quite an effort. Isn't it?
I've recently been asked to redevelop an .Net 2.0 WinForms application with a back end SQL Server Express DB.
One of the requirements is to allow remote users access to the application, so I've been considering hosted options to avoid VPN setup. The data is not sensitive and does not fall under data protection act, so a basic security approach for the web will cover me.
I like the idea of using Azure for a few reasons, but I'm not sure if a good fit for a users base of 5 or 6 with no real scope to grow. I've never used Azure and I plan to develop using MVC and a SQL backend as this is my main skillset.
A few points in favour of Azure in my mind are:
Tight integration with the TFS preview that I'm using for this project
Easy to setup a sandpit and a live version
Easy maintenance as I expect other hosted options will require more knowledge of underlying OS
Sticking to a full Microsoft stack should hopefully make things simpler
From what I find on the Azure site the message is all about scalability, which is great if you need it.
My question is simply, do you need a large user base, or plans to grow quickly, to use azure or is it how we should be hosting apps now?
What you're asking here is the perfect case for Windows Azure Web Sites:
You get 10 web sites for free (no custom DNS, but this is perfect for your 'sandpit'/test version). The shared mode supports custom DNS and is very cheap.
Tight integration with TFS preview and GitHub
You don't need to worry about the underlying OS, you simply publish from Visual Studio or with TFS Preview.
Sticking to the Microsoft stack is the easiest solution, but other technologies work great aswell. Since you're talking about MVC I'm assuming you are considering ASP.NET MVC, which is a perfect match with Windows Azure. Take a look at the training kit for some good examples.
The day you'll need a solution which more scalable (meaning you'll have more users and more income) you can easily upgrade to a reserved instance or to a Cloud Service (Web/Worker Role).
About your question: "My question is simply, do you need a large user base, or plans to grow quickly, to use azure or is it how we should be hosting apps now?"
Windows Azure is a cloud service platform (includes PaaS as Cloud Services, IaaS as Windows Azure Virtual Machines and also Websites suggest by Sandrino above), and with cloud services you have ability to start very small and grow as much and as quickly as your user requirement is, so you can use Azure with both cases. On the other hand there are some advantages using certain offering depend on your which service you are going to use to run your application.
I think article (Section: "What Should I Use? Making a Choice") will explain the strategy about how you make a selection among various services.
This SO discussion does talks about the difference between cloud Services and Azure WebSites as well.