October 30th, 2019

Azure IoT Tools October Update: new experience of sending device-to-cloud messages and more!

Jun Han
Senior Software Engineer

Welcome to the October update of Azure IoT Tools!

In this October release, you will see the totally new experience of sending device-to-cloud messages and Azure IoT Device Provisioning Service support in Visual Studio Code.

New experience of sending device-to-cloud messages

Z, a software engineer, developed an application about a smart home assistant using Azure IoT service, and he wonders if the application works fine. He wants to send messages indicating time and temperature to IoT Hub from many devices simultaneously each for many iterations. In this case, these messages should be formed in a similar template but the data should be randomly generated for each message. In addition, he wants to send these messages repeatedly, each with a fixed interval, like one second, as is done by true temperature sensors.

This is a very common scenario in IoT development, frustrating a lot of programmers. Here is the good news for Z, and for all of you: You can get rid of all these trivial things with the help of our new feature!

We improved the function in Azure IoT Hub extension (part of the Azure IoT Tools extension pack now) to help you quickly send D2C messages. You only need to specify the device(s), the number of iteration(s), the delivery interval, and the data template. And then we will randomly generate data in your specified format for you and send it out.

For more details, you can check out this blog post to see how to use this feature with the step-by-step instructions.

Support Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service in Visual Studio Code

The Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service is a helper service for Azure IoT Hub that enables zero-touch, just-in-time provisioning to the correct Azure IoT hub without requiring human intervention, enabling customers to provision millions of devices in a secure and scalable manner.

We’re pleased to announce that Azure IoT Tools extension for Visual Studio Code now supports the Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service. You can now view your Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Services without leaving Visual Studio Code.

Try it out

Please don’t hesitate to give it a try! If you have any feedback, feel free to reach us at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-azure-iot-tools/issues. We will continuously improve our IoT developer experience to empower every IoT developers on the planet to achieve more!

Author

Jun Han
Senior Software Engineer

Jun is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. He focuses on developer tooling in Teams and APIs.

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