Monthly Archives: February 2013

Devices + Services: Near Realtime Sensor Data with Windows Azure Mobile Services, .NET MicroFramework, Pusher and ASP .NET MVC

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It’s no surprise to people around me that I have a strong desire to code more, so I did just that on a Saturday several weeks back and here is what I built – a new devices + services scenario using a Gadgeteer, the .NET MicroFramework, Windows Azure Mobile Services and Pusher and Windows Azure Web Sites.

Device1

Lets build this:

WP_20130213_003

and get some live graphs that look like this – note up to you to do some better styling :)

graphs2 – see it live here

The idea I set out with was to open up the power (and ease) of Windows Azure Mobile Services to embedded devices that can run .NET MicroFramework.  The scenario I come up with was to capture some sensor data, insert it into a Mobile Service to store the data for historical purposes and also provide a near real time stream of data for clients such as your web browser using Pusher one of our Windows Azure Store Partners.

Capturing Sensor Data

For this scenario I am using the GHI Gadgeteer FEZ Spider and I have already installed all the pre-req software from GHI   An embedded device that runs the .NET MicroFramework and has a bunch of plug and play sensors for rapid prototyping.  To collect the sensor data is quite straight forward

use the designer to wire up your sensors

GadgeteerDesigner

The following code block will show how to open the network and capture sensor data in this case light, humidity and temperature – is quite straight forward and resides within Program.cs.

With that we have now captured our sensor data which is good, but to be useful to me I wanted to store this data off the device. To do this I decided to use Windows Azure Mobile Services

Storing the Sensor Data in Mobile Services Ok the first thing that you will need to do is Create a Mobile Service. Within the Windows Azure Portal Click New+  

plus-new

Select Compute, Mobile Service, Create

Create

Provide a subdomain name for your Mobile Service. This will be the endpoint that your device writes sensor data to and complete the wizard

createMobileService

Once your Mobile Service is provisioned.  Click on it and select the Data Tab and click Add a Table AddATable

Call this table SensorReading and save

SensorReading

Great, with that done we now have a Windows Azure Mobile Service ready to receive our data from our embedded device.  Interestingly Windows Azure Mobile Services already has client SDKs for Windows Store, Windows Phone and iOS apps.  If your an Android dev support for Android coming soon – giggidy. 

All of these client SDKs consume the REST API that Mobile Services provides for you out of the box.  One of the powerful things that the client SDKs offer is a really simple client API for consuming these services for things like data storage and Auth. 

My goal was to provide something that gives a similar experience to .NET MicroFramework devs because hey if you’re already writing software for embedded devices which is hard enough why shouldn’t you get an easy backend too? I invested a Saturday afternoon on this and provided a quick v-slice for the Insert operation.  To do this I took the Windows Phone Client SDK for Mobile Services and started porting it to .NET MicroFramework.  Man I must say I feel for you .NET MicroFramework devs:

  • no<Generics>
  • no LINQ
  • no JSON Serialization
  • limited Reflection capability – where did the GetProperties method go in .NET MF, I noticed PropertyInfo was there but couldn’t actually find GetProperties?

It was like coding back in the dark ages .NET 1.1 ah yes I remember those days. Quite  a wakeup call of how far we have really come!  So needless to say the Saturday afternoon was longer and not as productive as expected, sort of typical right?  Anyhow I got out a partial port that provides Insert functionality and a quick and pretty dirty JSON Serializer.  So here is what it looks like to use it to insert data to your Mobile Service. First we’ll need to add a reference to the (unofficial) Microsoft.Azure.Zumo.MicroFramework assembly. You can find the class library for this in the Where’s teh codez section towards the end

References

Now create a class SensorReading.cs, this will be the entity you will insert in your Mobile Service

To interact with our mobile service lets now create a new instance MobileServicesClient in your Program.cs

One thing you will note here is that I have not looked into how https is handled in the .NET MF so I am just using the http protocol for writing up to the Mobile Service I still need to investigate support for https on .NET MF. Now lets update temperatureHumidity_MeasurementComplete to create a new sensor reading and store insert it into your Windows Azure Mobile Service (backed by a Windows Azure SQL Database)

That’s it pretty easy right! You’ll note from an API consumer perspective that its pretty close to the experience you get for the Win Store and WP client SDKs minus the fact that I didn’t write a JSON Deserializer yet so I am not currently rehydrating the entity that was passed to the Mobile Service with the updated Id or updated properties…

So now that I had my sensor readings being stored in Windows Azure Mobile Services I wanted to look at how I could visualize this data.

Sending the sensor data to listening clients using Pusher

This is where things get pretty sweet. I wanted to visualize my sensor data in a graph as it arrived in my Mobile Service. Recently we announced a new Windows Azure Store partner – Pusher a  WebSocket Powered Realtime Messaging Service.  Within the Windows Azure Store you can quickly provision a Pusher account and utilize it from Mobile Services within minutes as follows.

Press New+

plus-new

Select Store

NewStore

Select the Pusher add-on

StorePusher

Walk through the remainder of the Wizard to select your plan and get your keys

PusherPlan

Note: if the Windows Azure Store is currently not available in your region you can sign up directly on Pusher.com

Next in the Windows Azure Portal select your SensorReading table and click the script tab and set the dropdown to Insert. This will allow us to write code, called Server Scripts, that will be executed every time our Gadgeteer inserts data into our SensorReading table in Mobile Service.

insertscript

Next we replace the insert code of our script to do two things save the data to our database and then use Pusher subscription to send our sensor data as it is received to all listening clients.

 

Graphing the data received via Pusher in a web client running on Windows Azure Web Sites

So now we had our sensor data collected, inserted and stored in Mobile Services and then pushed using pusher to any listening clients.  What I wanted was a web client to visualize the data in a graph as it arrived. You can learn how to create a free Windows Azure Website using ASP.NET MVC and deploy it to Windows Azure here – http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/tutorials/get-started/

The following code shows how you can write a quick, not so pretty code+UI wise,  graph that will receive the sensor data live via Pusher and update the graph.  To do this I am using jqplot and the Pusher JavaScript library. First add your script references to _Layout.cshtml

Then add your jquery.jqplot.min.css to your /Content folder. Next we need to Update our Home/Index.cshtml view to listen/bind to our Pusher Channel and then redraw our jqplot graph as data is pushed directly from Pusher.

If you read through the code you will see pretty clearly that the Pusher implementation is 3 lines of code only – to me this is extremely cool. Itty bitty amount of code, phenomenal cosmic power!

So that’s it now we have live graphs on our website, you can checkout a running version of this code and it live graphs that I deployed to a Windows Azure Web Site here – http://microframework.azurewebsites.net

How much does it cost

Everything that I did here can be done for free with Windows Azure Windows Azure Free Trial and/or the great free tier offerings for Windows Azure Web Sites, Windows Azure Mobile Services and Pusher.

Where’s teh codez?

This is unofficial, is not supported – I did it in my free time and it Works on my machine! :)  disclaimers all being said I really hope that this does open up a lot of doors for you for building out a whole new range of devices + services scenarios using Windows Azure and our Store Partners You can download the .NET MF lib and sample code from this github repo

Summary

I hope this has opened the door to great new devices+services scenarios you can build out for your .NET MicroFramework solutions. With few lines of code and powerful services like Windows Azure Web Sites, Windows Azure Mobile Services and Pusher you can make working in the emerging embedded devices + services space a lot easier then it has been in the past. Please do let me know if you have built something awesome in this space on the Twitterz @cloudnick

Building Mobile Apps with Windows Azure Content from BUILD 2012

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//BUILD 2012 was an awesome event! this post is a little late.  Although late this content is still extremely relevant if you are building Connected Mobile Apps. Here are a couple of sessions you should watch:

Keynote Demo of Windows Azure Mobile Services
During //BUILD 2012 I was fortunate enough to be to be on point for delivering the day 2 Mobile Services keynote demo app Event Buddy.  If you have not watched this keynote demo I would recommend you check it out – the Mobile Services Demo starts about 10mins 30 seconds in


Direct Video link on Channel9.  Event Buddy is now also available as a Code Sample that you can download here.

Developing Mobile Solutions on Windows Azure – Part I

Watch Josh take a Windows Phone 8 + Windows Store application and light it up with cloud services to handle data, authentication and push notifications – right before your eyes with Windows Azure Mobile Services. Almost all demo and no slides, this session is designed to take you from zero to Mobile Services here in 60 minutes.

You can also watch this video directly on Channel 9 here.
Developing Mobile Solutions on Windows Azure – Part I

In addition to this I also presented with fellow baldy – Chris Risner.  In this session we took the output of Part I  from Josh and demonstrated how you could extend your existing applications to support common scenarios such as geo-location, media, and cloud to device messaging using services from Windows Azure.   Here a summary of the content of this presentation that I humbly grabbed directly from a prior post by Chris

  • We took pictures and uploaded them to Blob Storage.  For this we used a web service layer, running in Windows Azure Websites, to get a SAS (Shared Access Signature) which allowed us to securely upload to blob storage.
  • We then got the location of the device and used that information to geo-tag the pictures we just uploaded.
  • We added a web page to our web service which allowed a user to select a geographical area on a map and request a push notification be sent to anyone that had taken a picture inside of it (this used the Bing Maps API and Queues from Windows Azure Storage)
  • We deployed a worker role to Windows Azure Cloud Services which would check the queue and then figure out who should be notified (using Entity Framework’s geospatial support) and sent out the actual push notifications to both the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 clients.

Here is the direct link to watch on Channel 9 and Chris has also made the code available here
Enjoy,

Nick Harris

Top Ten Reasons to Compete in the Imagine Cup Windows Azure Challenge!

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Have you checked out the Imagine Cup Windows Azure Challenge? It’s not too late! You’ve got until February 15 for someone on your team to pass the Windows Azure Challenge quiz, which is available from your Dashboard once you’ve signed up for the challenge and created a team.

We’re spending this week sharing information about the challenge and about developing for Windows Azure. Here’s my Top Ten Reasons to Compete in the Windows Azure Challenge:

  1. You get a Windows Azure account to build your submission for FREE!
  2. Much more power than your favorite superhero without the occupational risks!  From the safety of your couch with a click of a button you can quickly build, deploy, and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers.
  3. Born to code? Me too, we already have so much in common :) – Windows, Mac, Linux – .NET, node.js, java, php, python and others you can build applications using any operating system, language or tool. Use what works best for you!
  4. When building your solutions you consider leveraging partners from the Windows Azure Store who provide both application and data services.  For example you could use Microsoft Translator to translate text and SendGrid to send an email.
  5. Need a Database? Apply your existing knowledge and hit the ground running using one of the following popular databases including Windows Azure SQL Database, MySQL and MongoDB.
  6. Building a distributed system? Check out Service Bus for relayed connectivity between distributed components anywhere in the globe!
  7. Got Video? Build media solutions using Windows Azure Media Services: Ingest, Encode, Protect and Stream media from the cloud with ease.
  8. Go Web go! With Windows Azure Web Sites there is no easier way to get a web site up and running in seconds. Before you could read a whole paragraph on how to use Web Sites, you could have a site up and running with a database back-end.   Develop with ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js and deploy in seconds with FTP, Git or TFS.
  9. Got Mobile? When competing in a world class challenge every minute counts.  Within seconds you can use Windows Azure Mobile Services to create a back-end for your Windows Store + Windows Phone apps to incorporate structured storage, user authentication, and push notifications.

And the number one reason to compete in the Windows Azure Challenge is . . .

  1. Got Job? huh… wait!, what now? When the competition is all done and dusted, the skills you’ve gained working with Windows Azure will set you well apart from the rest when it comes to looking for your dream job — it did for me!

Nick Harris | Imagine Cup Windows Azure Challenge Captain | @cloudnick

Announcing the Windows Azure Boost for Imagine Cup

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WinAzure_rgb_Cyan_S

Windows Azure is a suite of powerful cloud services that can help your app projects in a variety of ways. If your Imagine Cup team is thinking about exploring Windows Azure, the decision just got a lot easier thanks to the Windows Azure Boost!

At our worldwide finals next July in St. Petersburg, our first place winners who include Windows Azure in their project can earn an extra $1,000 or $3,000 for their team!

We actually have two Windows Azure Boosts. Our first boost is for those teams using Windows Azure Cloud Services, Websites, or Virtual Machines. Use any or all of those technologies and your team could win $1,000! Our second Boost is for using Windows Azure Mobile Services. Incorporate that into your project and your team could win $1,000 for it. And best of all, you can go for the double shot: if your team wins both Boosts you’ll get $3,000!

So if you’re submitting a project to the Windows Phone Challenge, for example, consider using Windows Azure Mobile Services in your project. If you’re our top winner in that challenge, your team will earn an extra thousand dollars thanks to the Windows Azure Boost. Add Windows Azure Cloud Services, Websites, or Virtual Machines and your winning team would get the double shot of $3,000!

(This is open to all competitions and challenges except the Windows Azure Challenge, since that would be redundant.)

We’re really looking forward to seeing your great projects in St. Petersburg. And if your project uses Windows Azure, your team could earn the thousand-buck boost or even the double shot for three thousand.

To get you started, here are some links to help you out:

Good luck and happy coding! Official rules for the Windows Azure Boost are here.

Nick Harris | Imagine Cup Windows Azure Challenge Captain | @cloudnick