We need to create a mobile service that matches customers to the existing customers in the sales system, allowing them to see their orders and receive notifications when an order status changes and receive news about things such as new product launches.

To retrieve the data, we can use a Windows Azure mobile services custom controller, which is pretty much the same as the Web API controllers we've already used, or remap the data from our own data schema to be consumed by data services, which implement an ITableData interface, which enforces a number of default table requirements using a tool such as AutoMapper (https://github.com/AutoMapper/AutoMapper). In our application, we don't have a large amount of interaction with the database; we're only retrieving orders, and so I've taken the approach of using a custom controller rather than mapping the schema to ITableData, which, in this case, is an unnecessary overhead. If we were creating a new database...