• [0:52] How can developers capitalize on making apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone?
• [6:37] How can developers get started making apps?
• [10:09] How do I sign up for the App Builder Program?
• [10:28] What is the App Builder Virtual Summit?
• [11:41] Who should attend the Summit? Is it just for developers?
• [14:32] How do I sign up? How much does it cost?

App Builder Virtual Summit, May 2^nd There’s never been a better time to build for Windows!  Attend the Virtual Summit and learn about the Windows ecosystem opportunity, design and monetization tips, partner development frameworks, and even reviews from iOS and Android developers. Don’t miss this FREE online event, REGISTER today!

______________

Need Convincing? Tune in to the latest Microsoft DevRadio episode: 
“ How I’ve Made OVER $100k with My Windows 8 Apps”
Michael Palermo welcomes Kevin Ashley to the show as they discuss how Kevin has made over $100k on his Windows 8 apps. Tune in as they discuss some tips and tricks for how you can improve your app revenue like  how to properly price your app and various monetization options that are available to you such as in-app purchase, pay-per download and advertising.

Resources:

• Download the Windows 8 Enterprise Evaluation
• Windows 8 Enterprise
• Windows 8 Licensing
• The Springboard Series Blog
• Windows 8 Resources for IT Pros on Springboard
• Resources for Developers to Build Windows 8 Apps
• Windows 8 resources for partners on Microsoft Partner Network

• [1:58] What has improved in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager to support new devices running Windows 8?
• [3:38] Can Configuration Manager manage non-Windows based devices as well?
• [4:25] How does System Center 2012 better support the mobile user?

Download the Windows 8 Enterprise Evaluation today and test your applications, hardware and deployment strategies with Windows 8.

Resources:

• Windows 8 Enterprise
• Windows 8 Licensing
• The Springboard Series Blog
• Windows 8 Resources for IT Pros on Springboard
• Resources for Developers to Build Windows 8 Apps
• Windows 8 resources for partners on Microsoft Partner Network

Service Bus Notification Hubs are an intrinsic feature of Windows Azure Service Bus and are different from other push notification services in four key areas:

• Complete client registration management. Your backend application does not need to worry at all about device-ids or channels or other particulars of push notifications and doesn't need to cooperate in management. It doesn't even have to be a web app that's publicly accessible.  
• Platform independence. Service Bus Notification Hubs allow cross-platform push notifications so that iOS Alerts and Windows Live Tiles can be targeted with a single event message. 
• Broadcast and tag-based Multicast - Service Bus Notification Hubs are optimized around automatic notification broadcast to many thousand devices with low latency. One message in, thousands of notifications out.
• Mass customization - Notification Hub notification templates allow for customization of notification delivery for each individual registration, allowing each instance of a client App to choose how it wants to receive events.

In this preview, Notification Hubs are able to push notifications to Windows Store apps and iOS apps from .NET back-ends. Support for Android and Windows Phone, along with additional back-end technologies (including Windows Azure Mobile Services) will be added soon.

And here are all the key links

• Feature guide (Windows Store Apps) - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=275828
• Feature guide (iOS) -  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=275829
• Fundamentals - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=277072
• Tutorial (Windows Store Apps) - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=277073
• Tutorial (iOS) - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=277074

 SDKs:

• Windows 8 Managed Client Library - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=277160
• iOS Client Library - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=277161
• Preview client NuGet - http://nuget.org/packages/ServiceBus.Preview

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In this video Chris Risner walks you through signing up for Windows Azure and creating a Windows Azure Mobile Service.  Signing up for Windows Azure is a quick and painless process.  While completely free, the process does require a cell phone and credit card for identification purposes. 

Windows Azure Mobile Services provides an easy to use API for sending notifications to your iOS apps.  In this video Chris Risner demonstrates step by step how you can add Push Notifications to send alerts, toasts and sound notifications to your app.  The demo includes: 

• Provisioning a Mobile Service 

• Registering your iOS app for push notifications with APNS and receiving an identification token 

• Uploading an APNS certificate to your Mobile Service 

• Storing your identification token in your Mobile Services  

• Sending alert notifications as Inserts occur on your Mobile Service  

Windows Azure Mobile Services enables authentication scenarios with popular social identity providers such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter.  In this video Chris Risner demonstrates how you can authenticate users of your iOS apps using their Twitter account and then how you can restrict access to insert/update/read and delete permissions on the tables within your Mobile service to authenticated users.  

Get started with 10 Mobile Services for FREE and try this scenario using the step-by-step tutorial.

Follow @chrisrisner

For cross-platform development of iOS apps, Windows Store Apps, and Windows Phone 8 apps, Parallels is unparalleled since you can work with two different operating systems and related dev tools at the same time, in the same session, from the same desktop.

Here, Kurt Schmucker, a product manager at Parallels, gives a brief summary of Parallels Desktop 8 and demonstrates how to run Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 on your Mac without rebooting to a Windows partition first. Kurt demonstrates the Visual Studio Windows Phone emulator running along side the Xcode iPhone emulator.

In this clip I'll walk you through the basic principles of the brand-new Windows Azure Service Bus Notification Hubs in a somewhat more formal and serious fashion than in my chat with Elio.

Recapping from the other post,Service Bus Notification Hubs are an intrinsic feature of Windows Azure Service Bus and are different from other push notification services in four key areas:

• Complete client registration management. Your backend application (if you even have one) does not need to worry at all about device-ids or channels or other particulars of push notifications and doesn't need to cooperate in management. It doesn't even have to be a web app that's publicly accessible.  
• Platform independence. Service Bus Notification Hubs allow cross-platform push notifications so that iOS Alerts and Windows Live Tiles can be targeted with a single event message. 
• Broadcast and tag-based Multicast - Service Bus Notification Hubs are optimized around automatic notification broadcast to many thousand devices with low latency. One message in, thousands of notifications out.
• Mass customization - Notification Hub notification templates allow for customization of notification delivery for each individual registration, allowing each instance of a client App to choose how it wants to receive events.

In this preview, Notification Hubs are able to push notifications to Windows Store apps and iOS apps from .NET back-ends. Support for Android and Windows Phone, along with additional back-end technologies (including Windows Azure Mobile Services) will be added soon.

After the basic intro, I'm showing how to create and provision a iOS application from scratch, how to hook it up to a new Notification Hub, and send it a notification Alert using the portals and Visual Studio Express 2012 Web. (The equivalent Windows 8 walkthrough is here)

For those of you with a "TL;DW" attention span (too long; didn't watch), here's the whole extent of the code added to the stock iOS code template to enable Service Bus Notifications and that includes re-registering existing registrations at App startup. Decoration excluded it's 6 functional lines including one required by iOS - admittedly, without error handling.

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions
{
    NSString * connectionString =
    [SBConnectionString stringWithEndpoint:@"https://myhub-euw-ns.servicebus.windows.net/" listenAccessSecret:@"... secret..."];
    
    self.hub = [[SBNotificationHub alloc] initWithConnectionString: connectionString notificationHubPath:@"myhub"];
    
    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerForRemoteNotificationTypes:
     UIRemoteNotificationTypeAlert|UIRemoteNotificationTypeBadge|UIRemoteNotificationTypeSound];
     ...
    return YES;
}


- (void)application:(UIApplication *)application didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken:(NSData *)deviceToken {
    
    [self.hub refreshRegistrationsWithDeviceToken:deviceToken completion:
       ^(NSError *error) {
         if ( error == nil )
         {
             [self.hub defaultRegistrationExistsWithCompletion:^(BOOL exists, NSError *error2) {
                 if ( error2 == nil && !exists )
                 {
                     [self.hub createDefaultRegistrationWithTags:nil completion:
                      
                      ^(NSError *error3) {
                          if ( error3 != nil) {
                          }
                      }];
                 }
             }];
         }
     }];
}

The event-source code, written on the server-side for a Windows Azure Web Site in ASP.NET, is similarly terse:

var cs = ServiceBusConnectionStringBuilder.CreateUsingSharedAccessSecretWithFullAccess( "myhub-euw-ns", "...secret...");
var nh = NotificationHubClient.CreateClientFromConnectionString( cs, "myhub");

nh.SendAppleNativeNotification( AppleNotificationJsonBuilder.Create(TextBox1.Text).ToJsonString());

 3 lines. Three lines. No management of device ids. No public endpoint for the phone to talk to. Service Bus does all that. It really is worth playing with. 

And here are all the key links ....

• Feature guide (Windows Store Apps) - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=275828
• Feature guide (iOS) -  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=275829
• Fundamentals - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=277072
• Tutorial (Windows Store Apps) - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=277073
• Tutorial (iOS) - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=277074

 SDKs:

• Windows 8 Managed Client Library - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=277160
• iOS Client Library - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=277161
• Preview client NuGet - http://nuget.org/packages/ServiceBus.Preview

Fast forward to the present day, and Iguazu has become a real thing, thanks to an enormously engaged team who built a brand new service from scratch and plugged it into the Service Bus infrastructure. Today we're taking the wraps off the Service Bus Notification Hubs preview.

Service Bus Notification Hubs are an intrinsic feature of Windows Azure Service Bus and are different from other push notification services in four key areas:

• Complete client registration management. Your backend application does not need to worry at all about device-ids or channels or other particulars of push notifications and doesn't need to cooperate in management. It doesn't even have to be a web app that's publicly accessible.  
• Platform independence. Service Bus Notification Hubs allow cross-platform push notifications so that iOS Alerts and Windows Live Tiles can be targeted with a single event message. 
• Broadcast and tag-based Multicast - Service Bus Notification Hubs are optimized around automatic notification broadcast to many thousand devices with low latency. One message in, thousands of notifications out.
• Mass customization - Notification Hub notification templates allow for customization of notification delivery for each individual registration, allowing each instance of a client App to choose how it wants to receive events.

In this preview, Notification Hubs are able to push notifications to Windows Store apps and iOS apps from .NET back-ends. Support for Android and Windows Phone, along with additional back-end technologies (including Windows Azure Mobile Services) will be added soon.

If you can't wait to see teh codez check out the docs and bits below or watch my walkthrough.

And here are all the key links (if they're not yet active/current they will soon be)....

• Feature guide (Windows Store Apps) - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=275828
• Feature guide (iOS) -  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=275829
• Fundamentals - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=277072
• Tutorial (Windows Store Apps) - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=277073
• Tutorial (iOS) - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=277074

 SDKs:

• Windows 8 Managed Client Library - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=277160
• iOS Client Library - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=277161
• Preview client NuGet - http://nuget.org/packages/ServiceBus.Preview

For more information, please visit github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-media-player-framework.

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Get started with 10 Mobile Services for FREE and try this scenario using the step-by-step tutorial.

Follow @chrisrisner

To try mobile services for free, sign up for the Free Trial and www.windowsazure.com - you'll get 10 mobile services for free.

For more information on setting up APNS with Mobile Services, check out our tutorials at:

• Get started with push notifications in Mobile Services
• Push notifications to users by using Mobile Services

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