In this chapter, we went over what Windows Azure provides: Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service. We set up a free Windows Azure account and set up an Azure Mobile Services instance. Next, we created all the tables we needed to store our data and wrote a few scripts to add business logic to the web service. We implemented the client-side code in order to make requests against Azure Mobile Services. Lastly, we implemented push notifications for iOS using the Apple Push Notification service and for Android using Google Cloud Messaging.

Using Azure Mobile Services, we were able to get by without writing much of the server-side code—mainly a few simple scripts. In the next chapter, we'll explore how to use third-party libraries with Xamarin. This includes everything from the Xamarin Component Store to using native Objective-C or Java libraries.