14 DAY TRIAL // As announced several months ago, Windows 10 was designed to tackle more than just PCs, tablets, and smartphones, so today the company has introduced a slimmed-down version of the operating system that's designed to run on Internet of Things devices.
Basically, with this new release, Microsoft goes well beyond the PC and attempts to bring its operating system on devices without a screen and that weren't created for a Windows shell experience.
As Redmond itself explains, Windows 10 IoT Core is designed to come with a variety of languages, and obviously, it works best with Visual Studio.
Windows 10 IoT Core works with Raspberry Pi 2 and the MinnowBoard Max and requires Visual Studio 2015.
Improvements since BUILD 2015
Windows 10 for the Internet of Things was officially announced in April at the BUILD developer conference, but since then, Microsoft has implemented a series of improvements, including support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections. At the same time, Redmond introduced new Universal Windows Platform APIs, which, according to its own explanation, “will give apps easy control over system management features like time zone and network connections.”
“As part of our engagement with the broader community, we’ve worked with the community to support as many open source options as we can. You can find all of our IoT samples on Github, as well as documentation and a growing set of libraries and helper tools. Even our project system and runtime support for Python and Node.js is available open source on Github,” Microsoft explains.
Just like for the other versions of Windows 10, Microsoft is encouraging those who are joining the program to send feedback and help the company improve this IoT platform with new features and optimizations, as well as support for additional technologies.
IoT is a growing opportunity for everyone, the company says, so make sure you share your projects with the hashtag #makeInventDo if you're using Windows 10 IoT to build your own devices.