The Challenge

Mobile application developers already had access to Windows Azure through an available REST/XML set of services, but getting this to work on iOS and Android was difficult due to poor support for REST/XML on both platforms and the need to compute signatures/hashes required for REST signatures. To maintain the momentum Microsoft had already built with Windows Azure, the software company needed to make it easier for developers to build mobile applications that would work on the cloud computing platform. Microsoft called on Neudesic to help create Windows Azure mobile SDKs for iOS and Android.

 

The Solution

Microsoft publicly released the Windows Azure Toolkits for iOS and Android to GitHub under the Apache MIT license. Both SDKs meet the stated primary design goals: to make it as simple as possible to access Windows Azure storage services from iOS and Android devices; to be platform and toolset agnostic; and to be open source so that developers in the community could make ongoing improvements. The SDK source code was viewed 8,000 times on GitHub in the first 24 hours after release.

The Benefit

Microsoft made the code for its new Azure SDKs for iOS and Android available on GitHub to attract developers who were much more likely to be using other tools on that site instead of other open source code repositories, such as CodePlex. Developers can access Windows Azure storage services (blob, table, and queue storage) from iOS and Android devices using Objective C for iOS and Java for Android. With as few as three lines of code, developers can authenticate against Windows Azure, create a connection, and issue a command. A wizard utility also allows developers to run the Azure SDKs on a Mac