Since I’m a .NET developer who can’t be bothered with spending too much time in C++, what am I to do if I want to use the IoTivity library to expose and interact with devices on the OCF protocols? The SDKs provided are either C++, C, Java (Android) and Object-C (iOS). .NET is sorely missing (hint hint OCF!).

Well the key here is the C SDK. It provides the necessary export of methods to import them into C# using p/invoke. Even better this approach works in .NET, UWP, but even Xamarin Android, and Xamarin iOS (and probably more). So why not create a set of C# classes in a .NET Standard library that imports the methods, to call into the native library?

Yeah I couldn’t come up with a reason why not, so I did: https://github.com/dotMorten/IotivityDotNet

This is however a work in progress, but it already allows you to create, discover and interact with devices over the IoTivity protocol. Compared to the AllJoyn APIs, the IoTivity API is A LOT simpler. In fact you can create a device in a single line of code.

To use, first initialize the Iotivity service:

 IotivityNet.Service.Initialize(IotivityNet.ServiceMode.Client);

You can then search for device resources using Device Discovery:

var svc = new IotivityDotNet.DiscoverResource("/oic/res");
svc.ResourceDiscovered += (s, e) =>
{
    Console.WriteLine($"Device Discovered @ {e.Response.DeviceAddress}");
};
svc.Start();

When you're done, shut down the Iotivity service:

await IotivityNet.Service.Shutdown();

Look at the sample apps for examples how to create devices to discover and respond to requests from clients.

Note 1: Currently the SDK is building off a fork of mine that has a set of bug-fixes for IoTivity, rather than using the official builds. All of these bugs are logged and waiting to be fixed, but the IoTivity maintainers have been pretty responsive to this, and one has already been fixed recently.

Note 2: Xamarin doesn’t work at this point. I have not been able to compile the native libraries for these platforms. However it should “just work” once that’s done. If you’re interested and have experience building native iOS and Android libraries, I would love a hand with it.