Universal Windows Platform is almost new kid on the street and it’s time for developers to find out what it is, how it works and why to bother. In this post I make short introduction to UWP for developers. I also share some of my thoughts about platform and point out some useful resources that help you to get started.

When new Microsoft Azure services come they usually have REST API-s available. Of course, there are usually client libraries available too as NuGet packages but usually not for every .NET flavour. Although Microsoft has plans to publish libraries for CoreCLR too it doesn’t happen always fast. Let’s see how REST API-s work and how to prepare for using them.

Planning for search is mandatory first step when starting building search index. If we build search indices as we go we easily end up with messed up and hard to use indices. And even worse – we may end up with very complex search queries that need way more resources than we expect. This post goes through simple analysis of example beer store search index and shows how to create Azure Search index for products.

I have local database where I insert some data and I want this data to be available also in cloud. As a lazy guy I don’t want to synchronize data manually. After setting up local and cloud databases I activated Azure Data Sync to just find out that it conflicts with EF7 insert and update queries. As I don’t have many tables and my database is pretty small I invented simple workaround.

In one of my systems I’m using background process that hosts jobs that import and update some data and communicate with external services. These jobs are running after some interval or on specific moments. I generalized the common base part of these jobs so I can handle them as one in different background processes like Azure worker roles and Windows services. This blog post introduces my work and shows real-life implentation of jobs base.

Our beer cooling solution is not controllable through IoT Hub and it reports data there. We can control our device through simple command line application but it is not enough for us. In this post we start building Universal Windows Application that helps us monitor temperatures. In this post we focus on mobile application.

We are eager to try out our beer cooling solution and we want to see it in action. We want to visualize our data and keep eye on temperature of cooling beer. Before doing anything more complex like building web or mobile app we make a quick shortcut and bring our data to web, desktop and mobile. This post is about Power BI in action.

When cooling beer we want to store history of temperatures for two reasons. First, it gives us valuable history data for next cooling sessions. As a second thing we can ask measurements when we temporarily lost connection with IoT Hub. In this posting we make some analyzis and then build up database for our beer cooling solution.

As we have now fully functioning thermal solution running on Windows 10 IoT Core it’s time to focus to other components of our beer freezing solution. Our solution measures and calculates metrics of cooling beer but it doesn’t report this data anywhere. In this blog post we will set up Azure IoT Hub for our solution so it starts reporting measurements to Microsoft Azure.

In my last beer IoT post we measured out cooling rate of beer. In this post we try to estimate how long it takes for beer to start freezing. It’s actually simple calculation and we add it to our beer IoT background service before we focus on data reporting and persisting questions.