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Windows Store App Notifications, the Notification Hub and Background tasks

This article aims to talk about Windows Store Notifications and the Windows Azure Notifications Hub and it will attempt to collate the various articles in a single place to help you build notifications into your app.

In order for you to get an understanding of Windows notifications look at the following article

Introduction to Push Notifications - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh913756.aspx. this provides a good overview of how push notifications work. To summarise the important bits.

1. Your store app needs to register with the Windows Notification Service to retrieve a unique URI for your instance of the app. Ideally you do this each time the app starts.

2. If the URI has changed then you need to notify your service that there is a new URI. Note: This URI expires every 30 days so your app needs to notify your service that this has been changed.

3. Your service sends notifications to this unique URI

You may have noticed above that I mentioned “Your service”. This is a critical piece of the notification mechanism and there are a number of ways to build this service. If you are not comfortable building backend services or you want something up and running quickly then mobile services might be the way to go for you. Here’s a tutorial that gets you started with mobile services http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/tutorials/get-started/

If, like me, you already have a source of data and a service then you will probably want to wire in notifications into your existing service. depending upon how many devices you have using your app may dictate the method that you get the notifications onto the users device. there are a number of options:

  1. Local updates
  2. Push Notifications
  3. Periodic Notifications

Local updates require the creation of a background task that Windows runs periodically that calls into your data service, retrieves the data to put on the tiles and sends out tile notifications using the Windows Store app SDK

Updating live tiles from a background task - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/jj991805.aspx. Provides a tutorial on building a background task for your Windows Store App. this tutorial is for timer tasks but it can easily be used for push notification tasks. The bits that are likely to change are the details of the run method, the task registration and the package manifest.

Two more important links that you will require when you are dealing with notifications:

Tile template catalogue http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh761491.aspx

Toast template catalogue http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh761494.aspx

These two catalogues are important as they provide you with details of the xml you need for each type of notifications

Push notifications are sent through the Windows Notification Service to your device.

You can send notifications to your device from your service by creating a notification and sending it to each of the devices registered to your service via the Windows Notification Service.

If you have a large number of devices running your app then you will probably want to use the Windows Azure Notification Hub. This is the simplest way to manage notifications to your application as the notification hub handles scaling, managing of the device registration and also iterating around each device to send the notifications out. The Notification hub will also allow you to send notifications to Windows Phone, Apple and Android devices. To get started with the notification hubs follow this tutorial:http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/notification-hubs/getting-started-windows-dotnet/

The nice feature of the notification hub is that is makes the code needed to send notifications simple.

 

NotificationHubClient hub = NotificationHubClient.CreateClientFromConnectionString("<your notification hub connection string>", "<your hub name>");

 

var toast = @"<toast><visual><binding template=""ToastText01""><text id=""1"">Hello from a .NET App!</text></binding></visual></toast>";

 

await hub.SendWindowsNativeNotificationAsync(toast);

Compare this to the code to send the notification without the hub:

 

byte[] contentInBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(xml);

 

 

HttpWebRequest request = HttpWebRequest.Create(uri) asHttpWebRequest;

request.Method =

"POST";

request.Headers.Add(

"X-WNS-Type", notificationType);

request.ContentType = contentType;

request.Headers.Add(

"Authorization", String.Format("Bearer {0}", accessToken.AccessToken));

 

 

using (Stream requestStream = request.GetRequestStream())

requestStream.Write(contentInBytes, 0, contentInBytes.Length);

 

 

In addition you will need to retrieve the list of devices that are registered for push notifications and iterate around the list to send this to each device. You will also require a service that receives the registrations and stores them in a data store. You need to manage the scalability of these services. On the down side the notification hub is charged per message which means the more often you send notifications the greater the costs where as hosting a service is load based and the notifications will be sent out slower as the number of devices increases but this would generally be a lower cost. If you also take into account that you will need to send out notifications for each tile size and that will increase the activity count on the notification hub for each tile size (currently 3).

[Update: You can send out a single notification for all tile sizes rather than 3 separate notifications by adding a binding for each tile size in your xml see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465439.aspx for more details]

It is possible to send custom notifications to your app which can be received directly in the app or by using a background task. These are called Raw notifications. In order to receive raw notifications in a background task your app needs to be configured to display on the start screen. However Raw Notifications can be received in your app whilst it is running when it is not configured to display on the start screen. A Raw Notification is a block of data up to 5KB in size and can be anything you want.

The following code will send a raw notifications using the notifications hub:

 

string rawNotification = prepareRAWPayload();

 

Notification notification = new Microsoft.ServiceBus.Notifications.WindowsNotification(rawNotification);

notification.Headers.Add(

"X-WNS-Cache-Policy", "cache");

notification.Headers.Add(

"X-WNS-Type", "wns/raw");

notification.ContentType =

"application/octet-stream";

 

 

var outcome = await hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification);

In order to receive Raw Notifications in your app you need to add an event to the channel you retrieve from the Windows Notification Service:

 

var channel = awaitPushNotificationChannelManager.CreatePushNotificationChannelForApplicationAsync();

 

channel.PushNotificationReceived += channel_PushNotificationReceived;

 

And then handle the notification received:

 

privatevoid channel_PushNotificationReceived(PushNotificationChannel sender, PushNotificationReceivedEventArgs args)

{

 

switch (args.NotificationType)

{

 

    casePushNotificationType.Raw:

 

        ReceiveNotification(args.RawNotification.Content);

 

    break;

}

}

 

Note: the content of the notification is the block of data that you sent out.

Sample background task for Raw Notifications is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/jj709906.aspx

Guidelines for Raw Notifications can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh761463.aspx

Periodic notifications also require a service but the application periodically calls into a service to retrieve the tile notifications without needing to process the source data and then create the notifications locally. details about how to use periodic notifications can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/windows/apps/jj150587

In summary Windows Store application notifications can be send to the app in a variety of ways and the mechanism you choose will depend upon how quick and how many notifications are required. Push notifications allow notifications to be sent whenever they are ready to send. Periodic and Local updates are pull notifications and require a service to be available to pull the data from. All of these will require some sort of service and all have an associated costs. The notifications hub is a useful tool to assist with notifications and it can be useful to manage the device connections as well as sending out notifications to multiple device type. It does however come at a cost and you need to work out whether it is a cost effective mechanism for your solution.

Windows Azure Websites, Web API and SignalR

One of our projects involves a web service that implements both SignalR and Web API and we were looking at the quickest and most cost effective way to get it deployed so that one of our customers could run a Windows 8 application as a demo away from the office. The application works well internally as we have the service deployed on one of our servers on IIS. The options we were considering were:

  1. Package the application up in an install package, ship this to our customer and then provide them with instructions and support to allow them to deploy and configure their application
  2. Deploy it on one of our servers and then publish the service through our firewall
  3. Deploy as a Cloud service in Windows Azure
  4. Deploy as a website in Windows Azure

We considered the fact that the first option would probably take us a fair amount of time to make a deployment package, test it and provide enough documentation and support to allow our customer to deploy it on their servers. The other 3 options involved us doing a smaller amount of work, but at least we could get everything working well before shipping the demo out. Option 2 would mean using our internal resources for something that would not be used that often but we would not necessarily know whether and when it was being used so the resources would need to be kept running limiting our capacity internally. Windows Azure was a good fit for this application and the choice was really between setting up a cloud service or use a web site, I guess we could have set up a virtual machine hosted in Windows Azure, but this was a bit excessive just for a simple web service. The two remaining options were to set up a cloud service by creating a web role in deploying to Windows Azure or to use Websites. The cloud service would involve more work for us as we would need to change the project to add in the cloud service project and web role and then do a full PaaS deploy to Windows Azure. This would then utilise a whole virtual machine (although we would have used an Extra Small instance), but the web sites seem a sensible option especially as we already have a number of them available for free. How easy was this going to be and will both Web API and SignalR work with Windows Azure Websites, especially as we were using preview software. I was surprised about how easy this was to deploy and I’ll walk through the process we went through.

Step 1: Make sure that the service runs locally,

Step 2: Our service uses Code First Entity Framework using a local SQL server. Create a database using Windows Azure SQL Server via the Windows Azure Management portal (https://manage.windowsazure.com), the copy the ADO.NET connection string.

image

Paste this into your web config file of the web api service. You will need to make sure that the Windows Azure SQL Server firewall has your public IP address configured and you will need to make sure that your firewall will allow connections through port 1433. Now run your application and make sure that you can connect to the Windows Azure SQL database. As we are using Code First Entity Framework, the database tables were created for me so I didn’t need to do any database deployment. The only issue I had with this approach was that I had to create the database first in Windows Azure.

Step 3: With our service running locally but with the database in Windows Azure we are now ready to deploy to the cloud. In the Windows Azure Management portal, click the “New” button

image

The “Quick Create”, enter the url you want to use and click “Create Web Site”

image

Step 4: We now need to deploy our service. In the Azure management portal, navigate to the web site you just created and click “Download Publishing Profile”. Save this to your computer.

image

In Visual Studio 2012, open your web api project, right click on the project in Solution Explorer and click publish.

image

This will display the publish dialog.

image

Click the import button and navigate to the folder where the publish profile was saved. This should then allow you to complete the wizard

image

Click Next and check to make sure the correct connection string is displayed, click Next then Publish. This should then start to upload your web api project to the Windows Azure Website. The deploy should be relatively quick and no where near the time it takes to deploy a cloud service. When completed, your deployed website should start in the browser and you can carry out whatever tests you need.

Step 5: With your website deployed you should just need to change the url of your service in the Window 8 application.

This whole process took less than 10 minutes to setup and deploy. One of the nice features of using websites is that changes are quick to deploy.

We had a number of issues to get this all working fully:

  1. As I mentioned earlier we had to ensure that the database was created before the EF code would create the correct tables
  2. When we first ran the Windows 8 application we were getting an error each time we tried to use SignalR. We received an “Incompatible protocol version”. This was because I installed the latest SignalR libraries on the server side code but the client was using an older version. You need to make sure that both the client and server are using the same version of SignalR
  3. We also had an issue when deployed to Windows Azure where it looked like the SignalR hubs were not being created correctly. It looked like the hub creation was hanging and not returning. This is a known issue that has been fixed but not yet deployed to Azure. There is a work around which is to configure SignalR to use long polling (https://github.com/SignalR/SignalR/issues/510). We did that with the following code:
   1: hubConnection = new HubConnection(App.SignalRUrl);            
   2: proxy = App.hubConnection.CreateHubProxy("statushub");
   3: App.hubConnection.Start(new LongPollingTransport()).Wait();

Windows Azure Web Sites is not just for web sites, using it also for services can make a lot of sense as the scaling model will allow a lot of flexibility and can provide a cost effective way to host your services, especially if they are not heavily loaded at the start. They are also easy and fast to deploy which is always a bonus Smile

Windows Azure Training Kit–June 2012 Release

The Windows Azure Training Kit June 2012 release is out now with the following features:

  • 12 new hands-on labs for Windows Azure Virtual Machines
  • 11 new hands-on labs for Windows Azure Web Sites
  • 2 new hands-on labs demonstrating Windows Azure with Windows 8 Metro-style applications
  • Several new hands-on labs for Node.js and PHP using Mac OS X
  • Updated content for the latest Windows Azure SDKs, tools, and new Windows Azure Management Portal
  • New and updated presentations designed to support individual sessions to a full 3 day training workshops

Deploying Windows Azure Toolkit For Windows 8 Notification Service to the Cloud

If you have installed the Window Azure Toolkit For Windows 8 you may want to deploy it to a real live environment so that you can try out the notification service and start wiring useful Windows 8 applications. I assumed this was going to be a quick task, but it took me a little longer than expected. Firstly when you try and deploy the web application and service to Windows Azure it won’t just deploy out of the box. You need to sort out the certificates for SSL, Out of the box the certificates come as a cer file and Windows Azure only accepts pfx file so you will need to convert the file.  I set up the certificate and deployed to Azure but when I connected my windows 8 application to register for notifications I kept getting errors connecting to my registration service. After a number of attempts to connect I determined that it was an issue with the certificates. The Windows 8 application has an appmanifest file which contains the certificate information. I set this up as I thought was correct but I still could not get the application to talk to my Azure service. Running in the debugger didn’t seem to give me any error diagnostics. Eventually I found this article which provided me with a bit more detail as to what was required (I was doing most of what was suggested). A number of additional issues arose which slowed me down a bit further.

1. When creating a new certificate I needed to run the command prompt as administrator. On my computer my user account is not an administrator so when I created a new certificate. In order to export the certificate I needed to run the certmgr as administrator.

2. Selecting the certificate in Visual Studio to assign to the endpoint was also an issue as it is deployed as administrator so it didn’t seem to appear in the list. I found the certificate and then copied its thumbprint (converted it to uppercase letters) and pasted it into the thumbprint field in the certificate in the role properties.

The Azure application was then deployed to Azure and the new certificate added to the Windows 8 client as per the instructions in the article above.

You should now be able to login, upload images and send notifications.

Now that’s working I can start to build a proper notification service.