Introducing ZuMo.API - Bootstrap Azure Mobile Services with Custom Authentication

Introducing ZuMo.API - Bootstrap Azure Mobile Services with Custom Authentication

A couple of days ago, I wrote about some issues I had when updating a Windows Azure Mobile Service to the latest Nu Get Packages.

Today I'm releasing ZuMo.API - a small bootstrapper project for setting up a small and simple Azure Mobile Service with custom authentication (.NET backend).

(BTW, ZuMo is short for Azure Mobile)

Azure Mobile Services is supposed to be a great, easy and fast way to get started creating a backend for your mobile app. Actually, it doesn't have to be mobile. It's a quick way to setup a full blown API with authentication and scalable in the Cloud, without much footwork on your side.

But it turns out that in all the possibilities, it can be a little confusing to find your way when you need something a little more customized than what Microsoft is showing off in their documentation and tutorial. One example is their getting started with custom authentication tutorial which is not bad. It just misses a couple of important steps.

First of all, it just mentions as a side note how you're supposed to call GetIdentitiesAsync to get the authenticated user. Something you must do in their backend when your users are sending request from those smart phones.

But when you figure out how to do that, you won't find much because they also forget to register their custom login provider so that the custom credentials will actually be parsed into something meaningful.

I'll add brief documentation in the readme of the repository on how the create an account, login and make authenticated requests to the mobile service.