According to Microsoft, it is intensively committed to the further development of standards and interoperability in the Internet of Things: "In industry, we particularly support the M2M protocol OPC Unified Architecture, OPC UA for short, from the independent OPC Foundation as a critical standard," it says and continues: "At Hannover Messe 2016, we already announced the integration of the OPC UA open source stack with Azure IoT and the Universal Windows Platform. Millions of applications and industrial plants that are compatible with the OPC UA standard will thus become cloud-enabled and can be centrally controlled more efficiently and flexibly."

Microsoft has now provided the OPC Foundation with a .NET standard reference stack and published it as open source on GitHub. The stack facilitates the development of OPC UA clients, servers and publishers - for sending telemetry data to the cloud: "Now OPC UA applications that are also cloud-capable can be developed for all common platforms with one source code base - this saves an enormous amount of development and maintenance work," assures Erich Barnstedt, Principal Software Engineering Lead Azure IoT at Microsoft.

Microsoft lists the most important features at a glance:

• Cross-platform: .NET Standard is platform-independent, which means it can be programmed with the same code base for all common platforms (Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10, Linux, iOS, Android, ASP.Net).
• Code examples: The reference contains sample programs for .NET, .NET Core and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). Developers can try out OPC UA with little effort and save time when programming their solution software.
• Pub/Sub included: The specification extension Part 14 (Publisher/Subscriber) is already integrated in the form of the OPC Publisher sample program.

Further information can be found in the corresponding Microsoft blog entry.