Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Creating the service is just the beginning, but as was mentioned earlier, it really doesn't get much more difficult. The
next step is to create an application to communicate with this service, and luckily, we don't need to do much for that, either.
Back in the Windows Azure Management Portal, click the service Name, highlighted in Figure
12-4
, which
will take us to the familiar Dashboard that is common in the Preview portal. This Dashboard provides a quick-start
experience that you also see when working with the other Windows Azure services such as Web sites and Database.
Clicking the service Name link takes you to the quick-start Get Started page, shown in Figure
12-5
. On this page
are provided two easy walkthrough examples; one which shows you how to connect an existing application to the
mobile service, and another which walks you through how to create a new application from scratch. As shown in
Figure
12-5
, this example will be using the Create a New Windows Store App option.
Figure 12-5.
Create a new Windows 8 Application
If you already have an existing application, connecting to it really isn't that difficult. Selecting the Connect an
Existing Windows Store App option simply asks you to select your development language, and you then just copy
and paste a few lines of code into the existing application; doing this provides access to the Mobile Services SDK to
perform the tasks mentioned above (save data, push notifications, and so on).
For this exercise, select Create a new Windows Store App, which provides a three-step walkthrough of building a
new application. Step 1 asks you to download Visual Studio and the Mobile Services SDK. If you haven't downloaded
Visual Studio yet, the link will take you to the appropriate page to download Visual Studio 2012 Express. If you already
have Visual Studio 2012 installed, click the second link, which will install the Mobile Services SDK.
Once all the appropriate tools are installed, the next step is to create the necessary tables. Tables can be
added at any time, and this chapter will cover that later on. Tables are used to store data that your Mobile Services
application needs. You can create any number of tables, which will be stored in Windows Azure SQL Database in
the database instance specified during the provisioning of the mobile service (in our ScottsToDoList example, this
is the MyMobileToDoList database instance shown in Figure
12-3
). Even though SQL Database is used as the data
store, the schema that these tables can have is really quite flexible.
