Summary

In this chapter, we went over what Windows Azure provides: Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service. We set up a free Windows Azure account and set up an Azure Function App instance. We implemented the client-side code for making requests against our Azure Functions. Lastly, we implemented push notifications for iOS using Azure Notification Hubs to consolidate messages going to iOS devices via the Apple Push Notification service and Android via Google Cloud Messaging.

Using Azure Functions, we were able to get by without writing too much server-side code. In the next chapter, we'll explore how to use third-party libraries with Xamarin. This includes everything from the Xamarin Component Store to using native Objective-C or Java libraries.