Cloud-Connected Mobile Apps - Build a Xamarin App with Authentication and Offline Support

As described in the first part of this two-part series, “Create a Web Service with Azure Web Apps and WebJobs” (msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/mt185572), in the August issue, many mobile apps today are connected to one or more Web services that provide valuable and interesting data. Although it’s easy to just make direct REST API calls to those services and process responses in the client, such an approach can be costly in terms of battery power, bandwidth and throttling limitations imposed by different services. Performance might also suffer on lower-end hardware. It makes sense, then, to offload work to a custom back end, as we demonstrate with the “Altostratus” project we’ll discuss in this article.