I am working on an iOS app and signed up for Azure notifications hub to use their push notifications service.
However I immediately ran into a problem as I set up everything but push is not going through. I looked up a solution to debug this situation and the documentation seems to lead me to downloading "Service Bus Explorer" https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/Service-Bus-Explorer-f2abca5a However this requires I have visual studio running, which requires that I have Windows. It's ridiculous if this is the case, since obviously you need to be on a Mac to develop an iOS app.
Am I missing something or is this for real? Anyone have advice?
Your best bet may be to install Node.js locally on your Mac and use the azure NPM to query the Notification Hub. Create a script:
var azure = require('azure-sb');
var notificationHubService = azure.createNotificationHubService('hubname','connectionstring');
notificationHubService.listRegistrations(function(err, registrations) {
console.log(JSON.stringify(registrations));
});
and then you can run
node scriptname.js
You may want to iterate through the registrations, pretty-print the parts that are useful to you, and so on.
Unfortunately, the documentation is scarce or well-hidden, so it is good to keep the NPM source bookmarked to see what the functions are.
Having Windows in a virtual machine to query the Notification Hub with Visual Studio is also an alternative. I don't find myself using it to work with Notification Hubs, though, just for optimizing queries in SSMS.