Archives
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Multiple Apps, One Azure Mobile Service
“Multiple Windows 8 apps, can they share the same Azure Mobile Services backend?”
This was the question I was looking to answer this week. I did the prerequisite search of the interwebs and found that this question has been floating around for a while now. What I didn’t find was a definitive answer. Let’s start off by solving that problem:
YES
Okay, with that out of the way I need to add a bit of a caveat:
MOSTLY
Let me explain
Yes…Mostly?
There are multiple scenarios that...
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Location, Location, Awesome Geo-Location
I’ve been publicly building an application called RMV Awesome for the last several months on this blog. Since the initial release of the Windows 8.1 app we’ve migrated code to a Portable Class Library, ported to Windows Phone 8, added monetization and integrated Azure Mobile Services. Next we’ll tackle geo-location.
Since RMV Awesome is all about wait-times at various branches around Massachusetts, location is a logical feature. It makes a lot more sense to order the branch list based on distance...
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Solving an Outlook.com and Outlook Authentication Problem
I’ve been trying off and on for some time now to add my Outlook.com account which I use for personal email to Outlook 2013 so that I can see both my personal and professional calendars side-by-side in Outlook. I’ve used this set up for years but recently it stopped working. Every time I tried to add it Outlook would return an error.
Log onto Exchange ActiveSync mail server (EAS): The username or password you entered isn't working. Please try typing them...
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Awesome Azure Mobile Services
I love talking about Azure Mobile Services. It is one of those services that developers are always shocked is available from Microsoft. Why shocked? Well, Azure Mobile Services is a fully-baked backend for apps that delivers data storage, custom API's, scheduled jobs, authentication (Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and Google) and push notifications. Further more, it is truly cross-platform with SDKs available for Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS, Android, Xamarin and Unity 3D. Oh, and did I forgot to mention that the pricing...
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Monetizing RMV Awesome!
NOTE: This is part of a series covering Windows Client development. Our sample application is RMV Awesome, an ironically named Modern UI application for keeping tabs on the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. In this article we'll look at monetizing our creation.
Now that we have our Awesome app on both Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8 we should consider monetization. Monetization is the marketer's term for "make money with this thing". Money? Money sounds good, let's do that.
Disclaimer: Monetization is...
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Monetizing Apps
Monetization is one of the most important and confounding choices a developer has to make. I spend most of my day working with developers and organizations building commercial software. App monetization is one of those topics that seems to come up fairly regularly.
The art of monetization lies in striking the right balance between the app's perceived value and the customer's cost (in money, time or effort). The rub of course is that both the perceived value and the customer's cost are...
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