Overnight the Windows Azure Mobile Services team released official support for Android. Along with the SDK Microsoft has also written a number of tutorials to help you get started. The best place to start if you’ve never used Windows Azure Mobile Services before is the Getting started with Mobile Services tutorial. After you complete the initial walkthrough, there are a number of options you can look at depending on what your specific needs are:

Data

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Get started with data – Learn how you can use Mobile Services to store and retrieve data from an app.

Validate and modify data using server scripts – You can use server scripts to validate and modify data when you are inserting and updating it. This tutorial show you how to define and register server scripts with mobile services and how to modify your app to take advantage of the new behaviors you define through the scripts.

Adding paging to your queries – This tutorial shows how you can use paging to manage the amount of data that Mobile Services returns to your app.

Users

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Get started with authentication – Learn how to authenticate users in your app through a variety of identity providers, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft, and then leverage profile data to add features like greeting users by name.

Use scripts to authorize users – You can use scripts to authorize particular activities for authenticated users. This tutorial demonstrates how to create and register a script that filters data query results based on a userID, to ensure that users only access data that matches their userID values.

Push

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Get started with push – Push notifications let you deliver information to your app’s users through tile, badge, and toast notifications. This topic shows you how to use Mobile Services to send push notifications to an Android app. In this tutorial you add push notifications using the Apple Push Notification service (APNS).

Services

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Send email from Mobil Services with SendGrid – Learn how to add email functionality to your Mobile Service using the SendGrid email service. This topic demonstrates how to add server side scripts to send email using SendGrid.

Schedule backend jobs in Mobile Services – Learn how to use the Mobile Services job scheduler functionality to define server script code that is executed on a schedule that you define.

Tools

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Automate mobile services with command-line tools – This topic shows how to use use the Windows Azure command-line tools to automate the creation and management of Windows Azure Mobile Services. It describes how to install the tools and how to perform common tasks including creating a new mobile service, creating a table, registering a script on a table operation, deleting a table, and deleting an existing mobile service.

• Windows Azure Mobile Services for Android