Building Cross-Platform Apps with Xamarin and Azure Mobile Services
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The Azure Mobile Services team is sponsoring a booth and mini-hackathon at Xamarin Evolve in Atlanta! We’ll also be presenting a session on Mobile Services at Evolve on Thursday.
Xamarin and Mobile Services are a great fit—Xamarin makes it easy to build cross-platform apps with a native experience, and Azure Mobile Services offers a variety of app services, such as push notifications, authentication, and offline data sync. Azure Mobile Services also offers enterprise features such as Azure Active Directory for authentication and Hybrid Connections for secure access on-premise data and services.
3M recently used Xamarin and Azure Mobile Services to quickly deliver a mobile asset tracking app that syncs with the cloud and runs on multiple mobile devices. The app gives 3M salespeople real-time insight that improves customer relationships and allows business expansion. The 3M development team chose Azure Mobile Services for a secure, scalable platform that would easily integrate and store data from 3M equipment and other sources. Jason Fox, Mobile Application Architect at 3M explained the reasons for the choice: “We have the in-house talent to build a back end from scratch ourselves, but there was no way I would be able to create a mobile app with all the back-end services in a reasonable amount of time without Azure Mobile Services.” Integration with Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio, along with built-in functionality, made Azure Mobile Services the best choice for a mobile-services back end,” said Fox. “Having the right tools and capabilities to put a stable, robust, and functional solution together in two days is a great story.”
After successfully building the app over the course of a weekend, the 3M division is looking at opportunities for creating similar tracking apps for other business groups within the company. “The platform provides us with an opportunity to quickly scale a full solution and provide updates within a very short response time,” says Jason Rivera, Manager of Product Development at 3M. “The benefits of the Azure Mobile Services platform place the power in the hands of our development team.”
To read more about how 3M is using Xamarin and Azure Mobile Services, see the case study. To learn how you can easily add a Mobile Services backend to your Xamarin app, see the tutorials and resources below.
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