Azure Mobile App Services or Web App Services for Mobile Applications and Web Admin Panel - asp.net

Question

I need advice as i am new in .net and azure, i am creating a architecture for a project which has its mobile application, web based admin panel and Website.
I am planning to host every thing in Azure. I am creating application in Xamarin. Application needs to have Push Notification, Offline Sync etc, features provided by Mobile App Services (Controller inherited from TableController).
I want to create 1 database which will be used by all 3 modules. I have already created a Mobile App Service and Database. Mobile application is using it as it was supposed to. Now i want to create a website and Web based admin panel and use the same database. Is this possible ?
What is the best way? Should i create a web project and perform operations on data via REST API? and use this API for Mobile Apps and Web based Backend?
I am really confused between different services from azure and which one to use. Should i use .Net Core or .Net. I need to know the best way to do it.
Edit 1 :
So far this is what i have done and i need to know if this will work fine in future when project get complex. I created database and back end via Azure Mobile App. Now i have created a .net MVC website and used RestSharp for CRUD operations in it. I have used the following code to perform the operations. Note the /tables/ part in the request url.
var client = new RestClient("http://xxxxxxx.azurewebsites.net");
var request = new RestRequest("/tables/request?ZUMO-API-VERSION=2.0.0", Method.POST);
string data = "{\"createdFor\":\"535862cf-e2b3-41de-99f9-88c47a77750c\",\"status\":\"IN_PROCESS\",\"createdBy\":\"7108147e-c11c-4d78-ac3d-d5d6c5eb78d0\",\"description\":\"Master room 5 door produces strange sound when opened or closed\",\"title\":\"Door Sounds Strange\"}";
request.AddHeader("Accept", "application/json");
request.Parameters.Clear();
request.AddParameter("application/json", data, ParameterType.RequestBody);
var result = client.Execute(request);
Console.WriteLine("Content " + result.Content);
Get and post operations works fine. Is this a good way?
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

As the official document mentions about Mobile App Features:
Authentication and Authorization (AAD,Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft Account,Custom authentication)
Data Store (SQL Database, Azure Table Storage,etc)
Offline Sync
Push Notifications (Client SDKS seamlessly integrate with the registration capabilities of Azure Notification Hubs)
Client SDKs (A complete set of Client SDKs that cover native development, cross-platform development,etc)
Per my understanding, if the build-in features provided by mobile app could totally meet your requirement, then Mobile App is better for you and it would save your time. For Web API application, you need to do all stuff by yourself.
Now i want to create a website and Web based admin panel and use the same database. Is this possible ?
I assumed that you could create a Azure Mobile App application (Mobile App) and a web application (Azure Web App) under your solution, and you could extract the DbContext related classes into a shared class library.
Should i use .Net Core or .Net. I need to know the best way to do it.
For choosing between .NET Core and .NET Framework, you could refer to the official document about choosing-core-framework-server.
UPDATE:
Can you please take a look at edit 1, and suggest if this is the right way or it can create a problem.
Your code would work fine, since the mobile client SDK just wraps the common processing as your provided.
Note:
For accessing only by authenticated user, you need to add x-zumo-auth header with the authenticationToken after you logged.
Additionally, for your MVC application to retrieve the data from your mobile app (need authentication), you need to log with your mobile app and retrieve the authenticationToken for your subsequent requests against your mobile app. At this point, except for Custom authentication, otherwise you could only leverage Client-managed authentication and use JavaScript client library for Azure Mobile Apps in your MVC application for logging to mobile app and retrieve the authenticationToken, then you could send request from your front-end or pass the token to your back-end. For SPA, you could use both Client-managed authentication and Server-managed authentication.
Moreover, Adrian hall has wrote some useful tutorials about developing against azure mobile app, you could refer to Adrian hall's book.
UPDATE2:
For custom authentication using an Identity Database, you just pass the username and password to your mobile app, then it would validate the user info and generate the authenticationToken. While for Auth0, you firstly login with Auth0 provider, then pass the token to your mobile app.
My mobile application has its own signing up and sign in option with username and password.
For the connection Username-Password-Authentication from Auth0, it would manage the users for you, while using an Identity Database, the users would be stored in your storage and you need to manage them by yourself.
Per my understanding, both approaches could implement the custom authentication for you, but you need to choose the better one that matches your scenario.