Shiju Varghese's Blog

In this blog post, I will take a look at Azure Service Bus Queue for building distributed apps in Node.js. Azure Service Bus Queues provides, a queue based, brokered messaging communication between apps, which lets developers build distributed apps on the Cloud and also for hybrid Cloud environments. Azure Service Bus Queue provides First In, First Out (FIFO) messaging infrastructure. Service Bus Queues can be leveraged for communicating between apps, whether the apps are hosted on the cloud or on-premises servers.

In this post, I will demonstrate a sample REST API app in a Node.js, by using Hapi.js as the web application framework and Azure Table as the storage. The source code of the demo app available on github at https://github.com/shijuvar/HapiAzure.

In this post, I will take a look at the new offline support provided by Microsoft Azure Mobile Services to the managed client SDK v1.3 alpha, which can be used for building Windows store apps with offline capabilities and syncing data between local database and Azure Mobile Service database. Microsoft Azure Mobile Services has been evolving over time with new useful features. On the last update, Azure Mobile Services started to support .NET for writing backend so that developers can now write backend logic either in C# or in JavaScript/Node.js. The latest addition to the evolving Microsoft Azure Mobile Services is the support for working with offline scenarios, which is an excellent feature, while we are building mobile apps. This lets the mobile apps to store data on the local storage in offline scenario and can sync-up the data to the Mobile Services storage when we are connected to the internet. The current version is a preview version available for managed clients. SQLite is used for persisting the offline data on the client apps.

A while ago, I had announced a single page application (SPA) demo, built with ASP.NET Web API 2 and AngularJS. Recently, we have been updated the source on both server-side and client-side. The current version (v1.1.0) of the demo app available on github at https://github.com/MarlabsInc/webapi-angularjs-spa. 

A while ago, I had introduced Node.js Tools for Visual Studio for building a Node.js Web Site on Microsoft Azure. Last day,  Node.js Tools for Visual Studio team has released a beta version of Node.js Tools for Visual Studio, which provides an improved tooling experience than the previous version. You can download the latest version of Node.js Tools for Visual Studio from its CodePlex site.

At the Build 2014 conference, Microsoft announces lot of exciting things which including updates on Microsoft Azure. Now Windows Azure has been rebranded as Microsoft Azure. This is good for Azure platform since Azure is a cross platform, which provides a polyglot Cloud platform for multiple operating systems.

In this post, I will take a look at the new .NET support provided in Windows Azure Mobile Services for building mobile backend. Windows Azure Mobile Services was a technology based on Node.js, where we write backend code in JavaScript and we can leverage the Node.js ecosystem including NPM modules. But with the new release of Windows Azure Mobile Services, we can also build Mobile Services backend with .NET, which is a ASP.NET Web API based infrastructure. This is super exciting feature to .Net developers as developers can now work with Visual Studio 2013 for building Mobile Services backend with .NET where they can debug, test and run applications locally with their favourite IDE Visual Studio. For ASP.NET Web API developers, they can work with Mobile Services using their existing skills.

Recently, we have started a single page application (SPA) demo in github with AngularJS. When we start this project, my plan was to use Grunt.js for task automation. But later, I have observed that there is a new framework named Gulp.js, that provides more cleaner and elegant syntax, which is easy to read and easy to write comparing to Grunt.js. Then I have evaluated the framework and really impressed with Gulp.js. Now I highly recommend Gulp.js over Grunt.js mainly due to its cleaner syntax.