In this video, Shen chatted with Yavor Georgiev from the Azure team about how easy it is to add push notifications to your Windows app, using Azure Mobile Services.

Why would you want to use Azure? Well, if you haven't built push notifications before, you may not be aware that even though there is the Windows Notification Service in the cloud handling all of the addressing of your messages, you still have to provide some kind of additional server based functionality in order to provide users notifications based on some kind of cloud based conditional occurrence.

(Note that you can drive notifications from the client as well, but of course these will have intrinsic limitations based on the fact that they'd have be driven from a background task).

Building and deploying a server application can be hard if your primary focus is mobile client application development. This is where Azure comes in. Yavor walks us through the easy four step process involved in getting this setup.

To get started, check out the full details on the Azure Developer Portal.

Before you start this tutorial, you must first complete either Get started with Mobile Services or Get started with data to connect your project to the mobile service. When a mobile service has not been connected, the Add Push Notification wizard creates this connection for you.

Let us know if you have any feedback!

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@shenchauhan