Episode 100 - Introduction to the Windows Azure Service Bus Notification Hubs

Recently we announced a new preview feature Windows Azure Service Bus Notification Hubs.  In this episode Nick Harris and Nate Totten are joined by Elio Damaggio Program Manager II on Windows Azure Service Bus who provides a great overview, and demo of, Notification Hubs and their use from Windows Store and iOS applications.

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

 SDKs:

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

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