Olivier Bloch

@Dixon: The best way to address developers needs is to put our shoes in theirs and there happens to be a lot of IoT developers out there working on Macs.

Hey @Aaadil

You always have something that needs to be flashed on the device (firmware, bootstrap) that will have the code to connect to the DPS service. But this code will be the exact same on all devices coming out of the production line. When we say zero-touch provisioning in the device management space, that means that you don't need to have manual intervention on every single device to provision them with unique credentials and code.

You will ask "but how will DPS identify and differentiate devices from one another if they all have the same code running on them?". Well, this is where HSMs solutions like TPM are used. HSMs usually have unique secret seeds flashed in factory by chip makers which  are used by our bootstrap code to authenticate when connecting to DPS. in the case of the MXChip devkit, there is an ST-Safe chip in there. Check out this sample that shows how to provision an MXChip devkit with DPS: https://microsoft.github.io/azure-iot-developer-kit/docs/projects/dps/

@xLANxDIx: The dev in me had a good laugh reading your comment... the CEO as well! :D

@Aaadil: The Remote Monitoring preconfigured solution already offers simulators out of the box, but if you want to test at scale (more than a few devices), you can use the Device Simulation service that comes in the form of separate preconfigured solution on azureiotsuite.com

@Aaadil: This is a legit question. Here is the difference:

- IoT Central is a SaaS solution that is managed by Microsoft in terms of scaling, multi-tenancy,...). With IoT Central you can customize the type of devices and the dashboard as well as some rules, all of that form the IoT Central portal itself. You won't have to host the services on an Azure subscription (you actually don't need an Azure subscription to try IoT Central :)) 

- The IoT Suite Remote Monitoring Preconfigured solution is a solution that deploys on your Azure Subscription and that you can then configure (down to the PaaS services and micro services) at will. Think of it as a template for building your IoT solution

Going one way or another very much depends on the level of customization you need/want.

Hope that clarifies things

Olivier

@Ian2: the short answer to your question is no, this is not something that I am able to tell you today as there is very little that is public about the next version of Windows Phone as of today. However, considering  the popularity of PhoneGap and the fact that this is a community open source framework, you should expect it to support future popular mobile platforms once they are out there.