Azure Notification Hubs – new samples & guidance

I am excited to announce a whole slew of new Notification Hubs samples and guidance documents which I’ll summarize in this post.

1. Notification Hubs – Frequently Asked Questions : This FAQ document provides a one stop shop for your frequently asked questions ranging from the pricing (yes the new pricing is based on the number of pushes in a subscription so it doesn’t matter how many hubs or namespaces you may have which makes using Notification Hubs very attractive), SLA to performance/latency characteristics and development/design guidance.
2. Notification Hubs troubleshooting guidance : One of the most common questions we have heard from you is how to troubleshoot, particularly when your sent notifications fail to make an appearance on the devices. This whitepaper goes through many common issues and points to tooling and provide helpful tips & insights on troubleshooting.
3. Telemetry Export sample : As you might have seen, rich telemetry data is available on the Azure Management portal via the various helpful charts. We also expose this telemetry data via REST APIs so you can export it and use it. This sample walks through how you can retrieve these metrics from a VSTO Excel application so right into Excel environment using these REST APIs.
4. Enterprise Push guidance : Enterprises today are gradually moving towards creating mobile applications for either their end users (external) or for the employees (internal). They have existing backend systems in place be it mainframes or some LoB applications which must be integrated into the mobile application architecture. This guide talks about how best to do this integration recommending possible solution to common scenarios.
5. Server side SDKs –
   • Java SDK - we now have an official Java SDK which is at par with the available feature set from our .NET SDK. The source of this can be found on github and the documentation is available here. You can do registrations as well as send to Notification Hubs using this SDK.
   • Node.js SDK - Support for working with Notification Hubs is available in Azure Node.js SDK available on github and the documentation is available here. Again – both registration and send to Notification Hubs is supported.
   • Python SDK– We released a sample for Notification Hubs Python SDK which demonstrates how to authenticate using the SAS keys with the Notification Hub REST endpoints and send notifications using Python. The documentation is available here.
6. Client side samples – 

• Push to Safari– Apple supports Safari Push Notifications on OS X which are widely popular. Once a user consents to receiving push notifications for a web site then they are able to receive notifications even if the user does not have the web site or the Safari browser open. And of course, user can unsubscribe from these notifications at any time using Safari configuration. These notifications are delivered using APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) which is the same service used to deliver native notifications for iOS devices which Notification Hubs already support. This is a tutorial on how to send these notifications using Notification Hubs.
• Chrome Apps– Google also supports sending push notifications to Chrome Apps. This is not a web site push and requires you to have Chrome Apps in Chrome browser. These notifications are also delivered through GCM (Google Cloud Messaging) which is the same system for native Android notifications. This is a tutorial on how to send these notifications using Notification Hubs to Chrome Apps.
• Windows Phone Silverlight– Azure Notification Hubs Windows Phone SDK currently does not support using WNS with Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight apps. This sample takes you through the steps to create a Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight app which registers with Azure Notification Hubs so that it can receive notifications via Notification Hubs.

Thank you!