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Real-Time Talk: Windows 10 IoT Core Background Tasks and ASP.NET Core Web Apps

Display useful information from your Windows 10 IoT Core application in an ASP.NET Core web app, essential for integrating IoT data into a solution.

Windows 10 IoT background task talk with a web application using WebSockets.

Problems

As my path to this solution has been troublesome, I am listing here the main problems I faced so my dear readers have a better idea of dead-end streets along the way:
  • I was not able to make the ASP.NET Core web application run under a Windows 10 IoT background service.
  • I found no information about when or if it will be supported in the near future.
  • ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Core have different SignalR implementations.
  • I was not able to make a SignalR client for .NET Core work with SignalR hosted on a web application.
I was able to make things work by directly using a WebSocket. It’s not as nice a solution as I had in my mind, but it works until things get better.

Making the Background Task and Web Application Talk


I worked out simple and not-very-well polished solution to make a Windows 10 IoT Core background task communicate with an ASP.NET Core web application hosted on a Raspberry Pi. I implemented two types of communication on the same WebSocket endpoint. The following image illustrates what is supported.
Windows 10 IoT Core background task and ASP.NET Core web application
To make my sample more informative, I also implemented some primitive functionalities to demonstrate how data moves.


  1. The Windows 10 IoT Core background task reports random numbers to the web application every 10 seconds.
  2. The web application has a simple console to send commands to the Windows 10 IoT Core background task. Supported commands are:
    1. opsys: returns operating system information from the background task
    2. machine name: returns the machine name where the background task runs
Here is a fragment of the web application's front page when the background service runs.
WebSocket sample output with command

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