Demonstration of using P/Invoke from C# to call the Azure IoT SDK C functions (Windows Only)
This is a C# wrapper for the Azure IoT C SDK. It uses P/Invoke to call the functions in the C SDK. It is by no means a complete implementation of all the functionality offered by the C SDK but it offers the option to use C# for interaction with the IoT hub where that might otherwise be impossible.
It is recommended that you use the C# SDK if possible. This should only be used when you are unable to do so and do not wish to switch to an alternative language.
If you intend to create an application in C# that will communicate with the Azure IoT hub via AMQP over WebSockets or MQTT over WebSockets and wish to run the code on Windows 7 you will find that this will not work. The .NET Desktop assembly that is used to implement web sockets depends upon a binary dll that is not shipped with Windows 7. However, the WebSocket support in the C SDK does not have any dependancies thus one can use that on Windows 7. In order to stay with C# this wrapper was created.
This repository contains two dlls that are created when the C SDK is built. These are aziotsharedutil.dll and iothub_client_dll.dll. I do not intend constantly rebuilding and updating these dlls in the repository. If you need a later version of the C SDK then you will need to build these two dlls for yourself.
In order to do that you will need to perform the following steps:
- Clone the C SDK with the command
git clone --recursive https://github.com/azure/azure-iot-sdk-c.git - Switch to the new directory
cd azure-iot-sdk-c - Create a cmake directory
mkdir cmake - Switch to that directory
cd cmake - Run cmake as follows:
cmake -Dbuild_as_dynamic=yes .. - Open the new project in Visual Studio
start ALL_BUILD.vcxproj - Build the project
The required dlls will be found at
- .\c-utility\Debug\aziotsharedutil.dll
- .\iothub_client\Debug\iothub_client_dll.dll
Replace debug with release if you are building the release versions.