msdnmagazine.com February 2014 31
need to be more creative. You can start by leveraging Clemens
Vasters’ code at bit.ly/1acvLdS, which lets an Arduino receive a
command to blink an LED light on the microcontroller. Th e code
implements a device gateway, providing a TCP endpoint to which
the Arduino connects. To maintain the connection through NATs
and the Windows Azure load balancer, the cloud service needs to
ping the Arduino every 235 seconds (just less than 4 minutes). See
Vasters’ C# project, LedBlinkerServer.
In our next column, we’ll take a deeper dive to explain how the
code works and how you can get the Arduino
to send and receive messages to and from
the Service Bus.
Wrapping Up
In this month’s column we presented four
patterns that can be used to build a reli-
able message exchange between a device
and cloud services. We introduced AMQP,
the open source message-queuing protocol
that helps to increase interoperability and
minimize bandwidth and is completely sup-
ported by the Windows Azure Service Bus.
Finally, we began discussing how to support
low-end devices connecting to cloud back
ends while using the Service Bus messaging
infrastructure, which we’ll continue in our
next article.
We’d like to thank Clemens Vasters and
Abhishek Lal for helping us understand the
brave new world of connected devices. Clearly,
the world of special-purpose devices con-
nected to cloud services is growing rapidly.
Traditional approaches to communicating
with a cloud service need to be reevaluated.
Security, bandwidth, network reliability, and
interoperability are just some of the chal-
lenges that architects and developers face
with special-purpose devices in the M2M
world. Using the Windows Azure Service Bus
makes those challenges far less daunting. Q
BRUNO TERKALY is a developer evangelist for Microsoft.
His depth of knowledge comes from years of experience
in the fi eld, writing code using a multitude of platforms,
languages, frameworks, SDKs, libraries and APIs.
He spends time writing code, blogging and giving live
presentations on building cloud-based applications,
specifi cally using the Windows Azure platform. You
can read his blog at blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly.
RICARDO VILLALOBOS is a seasoned soft ware architect
with more than 15 years of experience designing and
creating applications for companies in multiple indus-
tries. Holding diff erent technical certifi cations, as well
as a master’s degree in business administration from
the University of Dallas, he works as a cloud architect
in the DPE Globally Engaged Partners team for
Microsoft , helping companies worldwide to implement solutions in Windows
Azure. You can read his blog at blog.ricardovillalobos.com.
Terkaly and Villalobos jointly present at large industry conferences. They
encourage readers of Windows Azure Insider to contact them for availability.
Terkaly can be reached at bterkaly@microsoft .com and Villalobos can be reached
at Ricardo.Villalobos@microsoft .com.
THANKS to the following Microsoft technical experts for reviewing this article:
Abhishek Lal and Clemens Vasters