Playing with the code that I was using to get data from my car and stream it to the cloud I did something that I knew was a no-no; I hard coded the connection string in the code. There’s a number of reasons to not do this*; it’s less secure as someone can potentially extract the connection string and use it for unauthorized access and if the connection string ever needs to change then code needs to be recompiled and redeployed.

When a Windows IOT device is provisioned there is a connection string that is managed by the device; your application can take advantage of this and need not worry about the details of how it is stored. To make use of this there are a few libraries that you need to add to your UWP project. These include the followings.

• Microsoft.Azure.Devices
• Microsoft.Azure.Devices.Client
• Microsoft.Devices.Tpm

With the classes in these libraries you can obtain the ID of the device and then use that ID to request an Azure DeviceClient class that is initialized with the connection string that the device is managing.

Here’s the code to do this.

DeviceClient _deviceClient;

void InitClient()
{            
    TpmDevice tpm = new TpmDevice(0);
    string hostName = tpm.GetHostName();
    string deviceId = tpm.GetDeviceId();
    string sasToken = tpm.GetSASToken();            
    var client = DeviceClient.Create(
        hostName, 
        AuthenticationMethodFactory.CreateAuthenticationWithToken(deviceId, sasToken),
        TransportType.Mqtt
    );
}