I’m currently prepping for my TechEd Europe WP7 session and I like to prepare for the worst. My demo relies on some cloud services and also on WP7 push notifications. Push notifications are nice but they have one drawback for demos, I need an internet connection.
Now in the real world my application would indeed need an internet connection or it would actually be kind of useless, but in demoland I don’t need one as I can run the cloud services portion in the Azure DevFabric which is nice in case the internet connectivity in the demo room goes down, I have a backup.
The same isn’t true of push notifications, they are managed by Microsoft and if I can’t get to them I can run my demo even though my own cloud services are running locally. In order to get around this I wrote a simple WCF service that also runs in my Azure DevFabric along with my other services that can act as a push notification endpoint. It’s not totally seamless but it works quite nicely for me as I now have a fallback for push notifications as well as for my own cloud services. Continue reading »
