IoT at Microsoft Ignite 2017

The Microsoft Ignite just finished and what show it was again!

The Microsoft Ignite was held in Orlando and it’s a great event for Enterprise developers and IT Pros.

But if you are IoT minded like me, it’s also a great event regarding Windows 10 IoT and azure IoT.

And the best news is, a lot of break-out sessions are recorded and available already.

I counted 50+ Breakout sessions, Hands-on labs, Meetups, Microsoft Cloud Show en even a Cert Exam Prep. And there is also an Ignite channel on youtube.

Here are the videos and slides of sessions which are already available (or are available soon, only a teaser is shown on the page)

Introduction to the IoT Edge SDK V1, part 5: Watchdog

Update: Recently, Microsoft introduced the new V2 version of their IoT Edge. This blog is referencing the former but still supported V1.

In the past weeks, I have shown how to work with the basics of the current Azure Edge SDK.

Today we will look at a more specific need, a watchdog.

Using this watchdog, we have more control over the quality of the service.

I created my watchdog when I discovered I was depending on the time-out of an HTTP request to find out the sensors were not working correctly. These timeouts can take a long time (there is an example of 100 seconds).

Because I expect a message every five seconds, I want to be warned if a message is not generated in nine seconds!

New IoT community in The Nederlands, focussed on Microsoft IoT Stack

Just last week, Sander van de Velde, Jan Willem Groenenberg and Remco Ploeg have started a new community.

We named our community:

Our goal is to bring people together, people who are working with IoT technology on the Microsoft IoT Stack.

Microsoft is targeting IotT in numerous ways, from Windows 10 IoT Core, Windows 10 IoT Enterprise, the Azure IoT Platform, Development kits, Certified devices, IoT suites, Edge support, Reference Architecture, Open Source projects, e-learning, etc.

If you are interested in one or more of these areas, this community is the place to be!

Azure IoTHub routing revisited, Blob Storage Endpoints

Recently, Microsoft added some extra features to the IoTHub routing abilities:

1. Support for routing using the message body
2. Support for Blob Storage as endpoint

In this blog, we will look at both features using the Visual Studio 2017 extension called the IoT Hub Connected Service, which is updated also.

But first, let’s look at the new Blob Storage endpoint.

Sending telemetry to a Blob Storage container is a simple and efficient way for cold path analytics:

Until recently, there were a few ways to do this:

• Sending IoTHub output to a Stream Analytics job, which filled some blob
• Sending IoTHub output to an Azure Function, which filled some blob
• Making use of the IoT Hub ability to receive blobs

The first two ways can be done using extra Azure resources so additional costs are involved. The third one is only used in very specific circumstances.

The new Blob Storage endpoint is a simple but very powerful way of making Cold path analytics available, right from the IoTHub.