iOS Push Notifications in C# with Moon-APNS

I have been busy developing backend of an IPhone application which is sending considerable number of push notifications twice a day. Trying to fix some issues and bugs on other free and open source c# push notification libraries I came up with the idea of writing my own c# library and as a big fan of open source I’m going to share the library on GitHub.

The library is called Moon-APNS and it can be downloaded from here.

This is the first version of the library, but It has been tested under pressure and on a production version of an application so feel safe to plug it to you application. Moon-APNS can be used in any .net application web or windows based.

Moon-APNS is benefiting from new Apple Push Notification structure, called Enhanced Push Notification. Which enables the library to receive feedback on each notification sent to apple server asynchronously, you may say we can receive that response with apple feedback service, but unfortunately if you send a payload to apple server with wrong format, broken or missing device tokens apple will terminate the connection straight away and it’s really hard to figure out which one was the faulty payload when you are sending them one after each other because it takes up to 2 seconds for the connection to be closed. Using Enhanced push notification you can sign each payload with a unique identifier and even better you can set TTL on each payload so apple know how long they should try to deliver the push notification before it expires. Moon-APNS will send payloads and receive feedback asynchronously and will re connect and resume sending the queue in case of any errors. All device tokens of rejected payloads will return as a list when the queue is sent and feedback is received from apple with error code sent by apple so you will know why the payload was rejected.

In Moon-APNS I’m using free and open source NLog library to log all events happening behind the scene which makes it really easy to debug the application while you are on production and you can’t attach a debugger.

Sending Apple push notification has never been so easy with Moon-APNS you will need less than 10 lines of code to send push notification and receive the feedback.

Ok enough talking I think it’s time for some coding.

1) You should generate your payloads:

 1:  var payload1 = new NotificationPayload("DeviceToken","Hello !",1,"default");

Feel free to add custom parameters to your payload as bellow:

 1: payload1.AddCustom("CustomKey", "CustomValue");

2) Moon-APNS accepts a list of payloads, so I will add my payloads to a List:

 1: var notificationList = new List {payload1, payload2, payload3};

3) create an instance of Moon-APNS push notification class, and pass true or false for using sandbox, location of your p12 file, and password for thep12 file if you have one and blank string if you don’t have one.

 1: var push = new PushNotification(false, "P12File location","password");

4) Create a list for your feedback, returned from library which will contain rejected payloads list.

5) Saved best for last call SendToApple method and pass list of your payload.

 1: var rejected = push.SendToApple(notificationList);

Is that all? Well yes it is! So if we ignore lines for generating payloads I can say we are sending push notification ad receiving feedback in 2 lines of code. Everything you need to do is handled by Moon-APNS library for you so you can have more time to consider on your application logic.

Feel free to email me or post your questions as a comment and I’ll be more than happy to assist you as much as I can.

This is the first version and I will commit new builds with new features soon.