Adrian Hall

Adrian Hall

Microsoft Program Manager by day; Mobile Developer by night

Recent posts

Using Azure App Configuration for Remote Config with Android

September 22, 2019  11 minute read  

I’ve been playing with a new app recently. I decided I needed some support from the cloud around feature flags (turning on and off features for specific people so I can test things) and for remote configuration. Fortunately, Azure has a service in preview - App Configuration - and it does both of these things. There are preview libraries to go along with it for .NET, Java 8, JavaScript, and Python. Sadly, there is no library for Android Java. Fortunately, we can fix that! Let’s take a l...

Tailwind Photos: Registration (The Azure Function)

September 21, 2019  13 minute read  

A quick recap - we’ve got three identity providers integrated into our app, set up an Azure Functions App in our backend using ARM, and we’ve set up authentication on that function app. We’ve also swapped our identity provider authentication token for an Azure App Service authentication token so we can use it on our backend. Now it’s time to consider the actual Azure Function for registration. You want to store profile information in your backend. In my case, it allows me to communicate w...

Tailwind Photos: Registration (Authentication on Android)

September 15, 2019  7 minute read  

We are almost at the end of “registration and authentication” - and it’s been a seriously long way, which just goes to show the amount of complexity in the subject. Thus far, we’ve authenticated with Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, handled silent login and configured the backend resources. In the last article, we configured the backend resources to handle authentication, allowing us to swap a social identity provider token with a ZUMO token that we can use for further authentication. A...

Tailwind Photos: Registration (Authentication)

September 10, 2019  4 minute read  

In the last article, I introduced the resources necessary for my mobile backend, driven mostly by the serverless capabilities of Azure Functions. I also provided a mechanism for deploying the resources automatically using Azure Resource Manager (or ARM). Today, I want to look at the next step - authentication. In my Android app, I’ve already integrated the various identity providers (or IdP) for Facebook, Google, and Microsoft accounts. Having the IdP access token is great if you want to ...

Tailwind Photos: Registration (The Backend Resources)

September 03, 2019  13 minute read  

Over the last five blog posts, I’ve incorporated various social media authentication mechanisms and worked on silent authentication so that the user only ever has to log in once; if the user is logged in, they won’t ever see a sign in prompt. However, dealing with three distinct authentication mechanisms is not ideal. What happens when I add a fourth authentication type, or decide to do something custom like a username and password? Every time I use a new authentication scheme, my backend ...