I am hosting a REST endpoint using the ASP.NET Web.Api in a Windows Azure web site. I want to allow authenticated access to this api from mobile devices. The Azure mobile services seems to have easy authentication providers as well as other goodies such as push notifications.
What would be an effective strategy for using the two in tandem, the web sites to host the REST endpoint and the mobile services to do authentication and push notifications?
Before you think about anything ahead, CRUD operations which are initiated from the app only receive push notifications, for example, if you manually enter tuples in a database or through code, they won't execute the server scripts and thus no notifications will be send.
About authentication, you may send a token(can be primitive, do not expect to hash or encrypt, if however you use a database to store hashes) once mobile services authenticate your user and then only call the web api's. The thing is the server scripts are fairly limited and can't perform hashing, encryption or other computes which you may expect.
