The September 2020 episode of Wechsler Consulting Cloud News comes with a flashlight on the highlights of the Microsoft Ignite 2020 conference, including Azure Orbital, SQL Edge, WVD, Cognitive Services and many more!
This month’s focus topic are the Azure IOT announcements also made at Ignite.
I worked a lot with Microsoft mobile devices during my professional career helping OEMs to create devices as well as supporting customers to operate and manage up to 40.000 Windows Phones in their companies. The last version of Windows Lumia Phones had great hardware and they were really useful enterprise class devices, but, on the other hand, could not make an impact in the all-defining consumer market. This, mainly due to their lack of apps and small size of the eco-system. It was a sad day for me, when Microsoft pulled the plug on their phone business and I had to stow away my Lumia 950 XL, which I really liked due to its high-class, razor-sharp OLED display and the Windows Phone tile UI, which was easy and direct to operate. App development with C#, Visual Studio and .NET was fun and deployments secure using e.g. SCCM or Intune. Sorry, if this sounds a bit nostalgic! 🙂
However, I would never had thought that Microsoft would enter the mobile device space again after the huge losses the last attempts have created.
Surface Duo, therefore, was more than a surprise to me and in the beginning I was really skeptical, if Microsoft was having a “great idea” or just running another attempt to get a “bloody nose”!
After now having a closer look at the specs and capabilities, I cautiously tend to issue a “great idea” judgement, because Microsoft is doing quite some things differently this time! They are not trying to create a new development platform, but are betting on Android, an operating system created by a competitor, which is quite a step for the company. The obvious benefit is that immediately there is a wealth of apps and an intact eco-system available! In addition, they have focused innovation a new device class, the book design, which remotely reminds me at devices with keyboard like the Nokia Communicator as well as some of the HTC Pocket PC models. But, this time the approach is much more versatile, leveraging the two touch screens as display as well as input devices using pen or on-screen keyboard. The book design with hinges to me looks also much more robust and pragmatic than some of the folding screen approaches by the competition. There is some ongoing discussion on the missing second camera, but for normal day use cases the hardware looks well-equipped enough.
Major pain points are the really high price, probably significantly over 1.300,00 € over here in Europe and the fact that the device is currently sold only in the US and foreign markets are treated as second or third class citizens. Looking at the relatively short life time of mobile devices, this is hard to understand and companies such as Samsung and Apple, of course do global rollouts to surf the wave of excitement any device release creates within their dedicated user group. Not to mention that the history of this approach is not so encouraging looking at the list of devices (Zune, Microsoft Band, etc., …) that never went successfully global after an America-First release.
To get more technical info on Surface Duo, have a look at the great video above, or read the interesting and detailed Microsoft Mechanics blog post, which, thankfully, dives into technical details, to spare you the superficial marketing bla-bla one finds nowadays on standard product pages in the store.
Will I buy one, as soon as it becomes available here in Germany? Well, I am heavily tempted, because I do have a feeling that such a device could be a great productivity gain, kind of a small laptop at hand, especially travelling on plane or train, although I still think the price should be more reasonable!
However, sometimes there is pain, when you try to be “cutting edge”!
Many of us remember Windows Plug & Play and we certainly have some painful memories with it, especially originating in its early years. However, over time and with a lot of sweat and tears from the Microsoft product group, it evolved into a cool and robust feature of the Windows OS that has made the life of many IT-Professionals easier.
I am really thrilled about its capabilities! It is a new feature and therefore, yes, there will be some rough edges to expect as well as occasionally missing tool support along the journey, but as an IoT Architect, I would call this a very promising approach to tackle the device provisioning problem, we have in every solution. There are communication technologies available that try to manage this problem on company network level (such as e.g. OPC UA), but none of these have been able to develop a sound Cloud-native strategy, yet. The Plug & Play deep integration into Azure services such as IOTHub and Digital Twins has the potential to develop into a killer feature!
There is a great and detailed video by Olivier Bloch and Stefan Wick on the Azure IOT Show.
To me, this is just the beginning and I am looking forward to see more interesting developments around IoT Plug & Play happening in the following months. I can see room for a lot of IoT development process enhancements, modelling tools, solutions templates, to name just a few of the possible fields of innovation!
The August 2020 episode of Wechsler Consulting Cloud News comes with the newest Azure Talk about Azure Identity SDK, Windows CE App Containers, SignalR and Azure Data Explorer. This month’s focus topic is .NET MAUI, a new cross-platform UI framework by Microsoft.
Please find the links to topics featured in our Cloud News video, below:
Microsoft is providing a way to “modernize” older Windows CE applications by moving these onto Windows 10 IoT Core using a new feature called Windows CE App Containers. This is certainly well-intended, but customers should really double-check their use case, if it really makes sense to follow down that path, just to avoid ending in a cul-de-sac. As a former Windows Embedded MVP and Windows Embedded Silver Partner, I am very aware of the variety of CE applications existing and only in rare cases I would feel good with recommending to containerize an existing CE app to a customer.
If you feel the need to modernize an existing Windows CE system, there are several options you should consider first, depending on the nature of your application.
Here is a quick list of options that comes to my mind:
Hard real-time systems written in C or C++
Windows 10 IoT Core nor Enterprise are hard real-time-capable, due to Windows 10’s preemptive scheduler
Have a look into alternative hardware and operating systems from other vendors, or, quite interesting, Azure Sphere from Microsoft that supports hard real-time and is security hardened for IoT at the same time. It also includes support for the ThreadX real-time operating system (also recently acquired by Microsoft).
Normal UI or service applications written in C, C++, Java or .NET Compact Framework
Check, if these applications can be modernized by a new design leveraging Cloud technology! Candidates would be Azure IoT, Azure IoT Edge as well as serverless approaches such as Azure Functions and Logic Apps, looking at the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. Have in mind that nearly always, when modernizing applications, it does not make sense just to adapt to the newest technology level! Think about redesigning your processes, architecture and streamline end user experiences leveraging modern Cloud technologies!
Move your application onto cross-platform technologies such as .NET Core and ASP.NET Blazor! This often shakes off the chains of being bound to a certain hardware/OS combination and you ideally are able to grow a family of devices using the same software across different hardware devices and OSes.
Use a Cloud native, distributed architectural approach to be able to grow and advance your solution organically
Change the communication strategy in your solution from connected, directed calls (as it often is to be found in older applications) towards asynchronous, message based communication. This will add a lot of robustness and extensibility to your system!
Applications using certain Windows CE Apps or desktop features
Port your application to Windows IoT Enterprise, this will be the only path to be future proof, as App containers as well as IoT Core are going to be end of life at the end of this century.
There may be rare cases justifying a transition via CE App Container as a transition/bridge solution, but these must be thoroughly analyzed! App Container support is not just lift and shift and comes with at least “some” porting effort. Check if this effort really is as small, as the marketing department says, against possible porting/redesign efforts explained above. I always recommend 20% of the estimated porting costs as a threshold. If the to be expected containerizing effort is higher, go for redesign.
Keep in mind, that containerizing is only buying you time, you will need to port the app anyway!
Really large and complex applications, which are expensive to port
OK, the first mistake is to put such a large and complex application on a small embedded device running Windows CE! I am pretty sure, with this kind of application, you are having other troubles, such as performance and resource management problems on the device, as well.
The best thing is to port your application to a capable Windows 10 IoT Enterprise embedded PC system, right away. Do not waste money on a bridge solution, as it may cause additional problems and is not really suited to solve the existing ones. Redesign is a must, to make your app more manageable and fix existing issues!
Yes, there certainly are more approaches and arguments, but I think the ones laid out above cover most of the ground of this discussion.
If you need some ideas how to handle the transition in your specific use case or if there are other questions, just drop me a line and we will find a way to help you out!
Sometimes, it is the small things that make life as an IT-Professional easier!
Anybody who had to move and restore huge virtual disks knows what I am talking about. There are quite often two types of data on a disk: Unimportant data, easily restorable or always included in a base image, and important data, which normally is the business data for the user. In the past one could not separate this data easily, but was forced to go with the heavy lifting on virtual disk level.
Selective Disk Backup, exactly will help us out here, giving us a finer level of control on what to backup and restore.
What makes it interesting is that:
You can save a lot of storage space, as business data normally is much smaller
Restore times are shortened significantly due to the smaller volume
As stated in headline, the service is in preview! Just the right time to take for a test drive! 🙂
The July release of Wechsler Consulting Cloud News sheds some light on WVD and Security Center, the new FHIR API that helps to save lifes, the Well-Architected Framework for Azure, Hashi Corp Consul Service as SaaS, and OpenIDConnect support in App Services and Functions. Focus topic is Time Series Insights Gen 2.
Please find the links to topics featured in video, below:
SignalR. at least to me is an absolutely underrated technology, when it comes to real-time messaging. Disclaimer for my embedded readers: yes, at least, if you do not require millisecond response times – but that is seldom the case in standard applications.
What I really appreciate with this service is is the pub/sub messaging approach, which scales great and reduces dependencies between client and publisher to a minimum. All coming as PaaS in a serverless fashion! This is definitely worth a look!
A bunch of really great content is made available by the Azure IOT team to provide the fundamental information required working with Azure IOT. They have declared July to IOT learning month!
This sets you off to a great start and we are strongly encouraging everybody to join this effort!
If you have any more sophisticated questions or you need help with your IOT solution, we at Wechsler Consulting are always ready to help you out!
Having your infrastructure a code in the Cloud is certainly the way to go! Unfortunately it still feels like working close to the metal in Azure. Microsoft has recognized these problems and they are striving to provide more comfort and tooling, as Mark Russinovich states in his interesting blog post to the topic.
This is great news, especially looking at the tool support with VS Code. However, in enterprise scenarios Visual Studio is still the tool of choice and could use some love here, as well. As a VS enterprise licence is not cheap, this would be well deserved.
