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Microsoft working hard to unify its code base, all the way down to the IoT

Things are getting more interesting, long-time dev tells Reg hack

MS Ignite AU Windows CE might seem like a bad dream from this distance, but a IoT developer speaking at Microsoft's Ignite gabfest in Australia have told The Register it represents a starting point that now positions Redmond well to respond to the Internet of Things.

Mitch Denny, CTO of Readify and a .NET developer for several years, is speaking to Ignite about where Microsoft now fits in the IoT space, and took some time out to speak with The Register.

Even as someone who loves fooling around with gadgets and devices, he said, it's the ability to gather telemetry in the back end for analysis that provides business value, and gives a company like Readify a reason to exist.

However, as a developer, it's also important to get as consistent a code base as possible, all the way from the Raspberry Pi up to the server in the cloud. That, he explained, is the pitch Microsoft is using to woo the IoT developer.

For example, Readify developers might write the software on an endpoint that collects telemetry; if the code and drivers are consistent, then that software can become part of the mobile app a field technician uses to configure a fleet of devices; and upwards, the same code and drivers will find a home in the service that collects telemetry.

Microsoft has put work into making the libraries in the .NET ecosystem much more portable, Denny explained: code on a fully-fledged Windows desktop, code for a phone, and code for Windows runtime environments are getting much closer to each other.

Instrumentation in the industrial setting may be a cliché in IoT discussions, but there's lots of business value to be had there.

So let's take a butcher shop with half-a-dozen refrigerator compressors: losing a compressor on December 12 might ruin its Christmas ham trade, for example.

The immediate business value is that with instrumentation and communications, the behaviour of the compressor can be seen in enough time to predict the risk of failure.

Denny said the longer-term value is what he's trying to develop for: that the behaviour of 30,000 compressors becomes a data set that goes a long way to forecasting what's going on.

It's not just that the butcher suffers a brief blow from an outage: “As consumers, we don't tolerate failure that well,” he said.

So how does this play out in the mundane business of day-to-day development?

“You might have a bunch of sensors connecting to an Arduino-compatible microcontroller: all you want there is real-time machine code,” he explained.

“With a device like that you can install the Firmata protocol firmware – an open source project that will let the device talk over Bluetooth, USB or Ethernet.

“Because Microsoft provide the libraries to talk to that, your software can tap into very low-level sensors.” ®

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