Microsoft Adds Support For Google Cloud Messaging, Git And Custom APIs To Azure Mobile Services
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Microsoft today announced a number of updates to its Azure Mobile Services that include support for Git source control, custom APIs and Android push notifications through Google Cloud Messaging to its mobile backend service. Azure users now also get a free 20MB SQL database for mobile services and web sites for 12 months.
The other update developers will surely appreciate is the addition of source control integration with Git. As Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie notes, this now allows developers to cone their git repository on a local machine, work on their scripts and then “”easily deploy the mobile service to production using Git.” It’s worth noting that Microsoft also recently added Git support to Visual Studio and its Team Foundation Server and Service.
Developers can also now create and expose custom APIs with Azure Mobile Services. This, Guthrie says, will allow developers to work with data sources other than SQL databases and broker calls to third-party APIs. The custom APIs can be written using Node.js and can use Node’s NPM packages.
The free 20MB SQL database is unlikely to be large enough for a popular mobile app or web site in production, but as Microsoft rightly notes, it should be enough to help developers develop and test their apps.
You can find a full list of today’s updates (and a few code examples) here.