Azure Mobile Services has recently released several updates to the .NET backend including the following: custom scopes for social authentication providers, single sign-on for Windows Store applications, CORS support for SignalR, and support for ASP.NET Web API 5.2. If you are new to the Azure Mobile Services .NET backend, check out
this overview and the
Mobile Services developer center. To get the updates, update your .NET service project to use version
1.0.402 of the NuGet packages.
Custom scopes for social authentication providers
In the .NET backend, you can now request additional login scopes from an authentication provider, which allows the service to request more information from the provider using the access token. As in the
JavaScript backend, this feature is available for Facebook, Google, and Microsoft accounts. For more detail and sample code, see this
blog post.
Single sign-on for Windows Store applications
By default, on Mobile Services login, Windows Store applications display an authentication window and require the user to re-enter their credentials, even if they selected the “Remember me” option on the login page. By default, the cookies from an authentication session are not preserved, which results in this behavior. However, the app can provide a better user experience by using an
overload of LoginAsync, which specifies that the client should cache cookies in the authentication sessions.
CORS support for SignalR
We recently announced
support for SignalR in Azure Mobile Services .NET backend. The feature works well for mobile apps, but previously, CORS configuration settings weren’t used in SignalR responses, which caused browsers to block some of the requests. Now, CORS settings are used in SignalR responses, so the feature works fully on all supported platforms.
Support for ASP.NET Web API 2.2
The .NET backend now supports ASP.NET Web API 2.2, corresponding to version 5.2.x of the NuGet package
Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Owin. Now, all of the
new features in Web API 2.2 are available, such as OData v4 and attribute routing improvements. To learn more about these Azure Mobile Services updates, see this
blog post.