What is the difference between "azure sdk for cpp" and "azure sdk for c" ?

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XIANGZHIYINGAgilentCHN-9387 asked Mar 23, '22 XIANGZHIYINGAgilentCHN-9387 commented Mar 24, '22

What is the difference between "azure sdk for cpp" and "azure sdk for c" ?

Hi everyone,

I wish to find a single SDK from Azure to support my below needs:
1. Enable uploading binary data from my Linux device to Azure storage
2. Enable pushing status infor from my Linux device to Azure IoT hub

I might be wrong, but I realize that I need to use "azure sdk for cpp" to support feature 1, and use "azure sdk for c" to support feature 2.

This is weird to me, why can't Microsoft combine these two SDKs ?

Can anyone help me to further understand their difference ? And a further question, is there really a single SDK that can support my needs ?

Thanks alot in advance for any help.

Randy

azure-iot azure-iot-sdk

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rkiss · Mar 23 at 09:02 AM

Hi,

For your needs, such as sending a telemetry data to the Azure IoT Hub and uploading a binary data to the Azure Storage can be used the REST APIs, in other words, you don't need the Azure SDKs.

Thanks
Roman

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XIANGZHIYINGAgilentCHN-9387 rkiss · Mar 23 at 11:13 AM

Hi Roman,

Thanks a lot! Is there any example you could share of using such REST APIs ? Really appreciate !

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rkiss XIANGZHIYINGAgilentCHN-9387 · Mar 23 at 05:27 PM

Hi,

have a look at the following documents:
Device - Send Device Event
Device - Create File Upload Sas Uri
Device - Update File Upload Status

Also have a look at my answer here where is described an usage of the above REST APIs using the C#.

Thanks
Roman

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Answer 1 · 2022-03-23T14:40:34.167Z

SandervandeVelde42 answered Mar 23, '22

Hello @XIANGZHIYINGAgilentCHN-9387 ,

yes, there are two different SDKs both with its own purpose:
- Azure SDK for C++ (DOCS) A library to connect to eg. Azure Blob storage
- Azure SDK for Embedded C. The Azure SDK for Embedded C is designed to allow small embedded (IoT) devices to communicate with Azure services

These are to different use cases, combining them by default could be useful in your case but this is not the case for the majority.

I'm not sure what your usecase is but most of the projects I have seen, do not connect directly to Azure storage, although this service is part of the solution.

Two possible solutions:
1. the device sends telemetry to the Azure IoT Hub. Incoming messages are routed towards blob storage
2. the device makes use of the ability of the IoT Hub to offer the upload of complete files and stored them in a related storage

Especially the second solution lowers the amount of consumed Device-to-Cloud messages drastically.

If you still want to make use of the blob storage endpoint and SDK, the secrets of that endpoint must be stored on each device you deploy in the world. As an alternative, you could distribute the keys just-in-time using the Azure IoT Cloud-to-Device communication abilities (like the desired properties).

Although I recommend to use the Embedded C SDK, you can skip that SDK and try the REST interface of the IoT Hub. I tried something similar with C# in the past.

There is also MQTT support, an alternative to connect to the IoT Hub without SDK. The MQTT 5 version is in preview.

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Answer 2 · 2022-03-23T08:39:51.35Z

OlafHelper-2800 answered Mar 23, '22 XIANGZHIYINGAgilentCHN-9387 commented Mar 24, '22

C and Cpp = C++ are two very similar programming languages, but only similar: C++ supports OOP, C not; that's the reason for 2 SDK's.

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XIANGZHIYINGAgilentCHN-9387 · Mar 24 at 01:04 AM

Thanks for the explanation. But I do understand the difference between these two languages, I'm just not sure why the two SDK provides very different feature set.

I also did some research yesterday, seems the C SDK is also planning to support the storage blob, but not officially released yet. C++ SDK on the other hand, still does not support IoT related stuff.

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