This is the first post in a 3-part tutorial, where I take you from “File > New Project” to fully functional cross-platform CRM application for a fictional Art Gallery company.

Curious about what’s ahead? You can jump to Part Two of the series, where we’ll build the UI with Telerik UI for Xamarin, or to Part Three of the series, where we train a LUIS AI model using Telerik UI for Xamarin’s Conversational UI.

The journey will take us through building the ASP.NET backend hosted using Azure App Services with SQL Server for the database, using Azure Bot Framework and a custom LUIS (Language Understanding) for the in-app help service and finally developing the client apps using Xamarin.Forms with Telerik UI for Xamarin for a beautiful and feature-rich client experience.

Let’s get started!

Part One—Azure App Service Walkthrough

First, we’ll want to create the backend. Microsoft has a recently updated the Azure App Service with Xamarin.Forms tutorial, and it will walk you through initializing the App Service and creating the database the service will use. Before getting started there, let me take you though the choices I went with so you can follow along.

#xamarin #crm