How to tag your IoT Hub Devices

Until now, device twin tags were a bit lame.

Yes, desired and reported properties were much more fun to play with.

But those of you who administer thousands of Azure IoT devices, you really appreciate tags. It’s the only way to control that large amount of devices without losing your head.

Why? Because you first query your devices and then execute jobs on these subsets.

And Microsoft is making use of this feature a lot. You will have to use tags if you want to execute IoT Edge deployments (still in preview) or if you want to use the recently added Automatic Device Management (even newer):

But how do you actually add or alter tags of devices? What tooling is Microsoft providing?

Let’s check out a number of ways to tag and start querying your devices.

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Migrating existing IoT Edge modules to the 0.2.0 template scaffolding

Just today I found out a new version of the Azure IoT Edge extension for VSCode is available. Amongst other changes like new commands, Microsoft also introduced a new folder structure and new files.

Microsoft also introduced a migration wizard for old modules.

This was a bit of a confusion. My first thoughts were that Microsoft offered migration from the old 1.1 modules (based on classes) to the new (Docker-based) modules.

But this migration is offered for previous built C# modules and IoT Edge Azure functions. Microsoft offers some documentation but let’s look at this migration in detail.

I have built and blogged about a C# Heartbeat module. Let’s migrate it.