Microsoft Updates Azure Mobile Apps, Ponders Future -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft Updates Azure Mobile Apps, Ponders Future

By David Ramel
12/04/2020

Microsoft announced several updates to its Azure Mobile Apps service and is conducting a survey to solicit feedback on its future.

Azure Mobile Apps includes various kinds of functionality, including creating cloud-based back-ends for mobile apps that provide data storage, online and offline sync, authentication, push notifications and more.

A recent upgrade (to v4.2) to the service's client libraries updated core platforms and moved to support .NET Standard, so it now works for:

Android 6.0 (API level 23 or higher)
iOS 10 or higher
UAP 10.0.16299.0 or higher
WPF (.NET Framework 4.6.1 and .NET Core 3.0 or higher)

The team also updated dependencies and allowed for the use of Xamarin.Essentials for the in-built authentication support within Xamarin environments.

However, the future of the service, which was in preview back in 2015, appears to be in doubt as the mobile app development scene has evolved greatly since its inception.

"Since writing the Azure Mobile Apps libraries, the development world has changed, especially as it pertains to the area that Azure Mobile Apps covers," Microsoft said. "New protocols like gRPC and GraphQL have entered the mix. The mobile Internet is speedier and more reliable. New use cases for mobile apps require support for different database types like NoSQL and Graph databases. It’s time to look at the future, and we need your help for that."

That help comes in participating in a "Azure Mobile Apps Future Plans Survey" to solicit feedback from developers.

"We will continue to support and evolve our Azure Mobile Apps libraries, so stay tuned for more samples, blogs, and updates in this space!"

The "continue to ... evolve" part of that last statement seems to be at odds with the project's client libraries GitHub site, though, as it states:

"Microsoft is committed to fully supporting Azure Mobile Apps, including support for the latest OS release, bug fixes, documentation improvements, and community PR reviews. Please note that the product team is not currently investing in any new feature work for Azure Mobile Apps. We highly appreciate community contributions to all areas of Azure Mobile Apps."

A reader brought up that seeming contradiction ("We can use Azure Mobile Apps and ignore previous post where team says no more features and development for this product?") and was answered thusly by Microsoft: "Our current plan is to bring the libraries up to date and to investigate future investments, so your response to the survey is appreciated!"

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.