With just a few items you can get started building apps for Windows Internet of Things using VB, C# or C++ on a Raspberry Pi 3.

The Pi is a small quad core 64 bit ARM processor clocked at 1.2 GHz. It has built in blue tooth, WiFi, Ethernet, HDMI, and 4 USB ports. Read that list again. It’s pretty amazing to get all that functionality in a credit card sized computer for

The Pi has general purpose I/O pins that can be used to connect to electronic components, such as accelerometers, pressure sensors, LCD screens. What’s more, there are both an SPI bus and an I²c bus (“i squared c”, or inter-inter-circuit) which is useful for connecting many devices on the same circuit board with few connections. I’ve used the I²c bus to connect to a Digital to Analog Converter to generate and display waveforms for a speaker and on my oscilloscope.

Once you have your Pi, you need to install some software on it. You could install an OS directly, but why not install Noobs?

Noobs Lite is a very light weight operating system installer/manager for Raspberry Pi. It listens to the USB keyboard/mouse or the Touch Screen.

Noobs’ main purpose is to allow you to connect to a network (WiFi or Ethernet) to download and install other operating systems for the Pi (such as Raspbian. Windows Iot, or various media players.) It responds to the touchscreen or USB keyboard.

After the OS’s have been installed, it presents a screen upon each boot which allows you to select which operating system to start, defaulting to the last one chosen. (you can also edit the config files for the installed OS’s.  My touch screen display was upside down: just use Noobs edit each OS’s config.txt file and add the line “lcd_rotate=2”)

The Windows IOT dashboard allows you to initialize a memory card with Windows IOT, but that means it will have only one OS: you will not be able to play around with the other OS’s. The dashboard also lets you change the network name (and password) of the Pi, optionally create/connect to an Azure account.

Take the new memory card, put it in the card reader. If it’s not formatted, format the disk using Windows File Explorer (Right click->Format. Use the default options.) Then just double click the downloaded NOOBs.zip file, select all the files, and paste them onto the memory card, which puts them in place unzipped.

Insert the memory card into the Pi and plug in the Micro USB cable for power, monitor to HDMI (if you don’t use the touchscreen), booting up NOOBs.

While NOOBS is installing the chosen OS’s, a couple dialogs come up when it’s installing Windows IOT: one asking which version of Windows IOT to install: RTM, or Insider Preview. The other asks whether you agree to the usage license. It’s good to have a keyboard attached, but it also responds to touch screen. The whole NOOBs installation process with 4 OS’s took about 25 minutes.

You can also use an Ethernet cable to connect the Pi. Just plug it into the onboard Ethernet connector. The Windows IOT display shows the IP address, and the IOT dashboard allows you to change the machine name and the admin password (which defaults to p@ssw0rd)

Try booting into the various OS’s and play around. It’s nice to have the Raspberry Pi be a full media center, able to play videos from dozens of sources.

Be careful about under-powering the PI: see this post about under voltage USB supplies.

When running Windows IOT, the Pi serves up web pages that show status of the Pi, (even if the Pi is headless (has no display)). The web address is the network name of the Pi at port 8080: e.g. something like http://MyPiName:8080 )

From Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 or later:

File->New->Project->C#->Blank App (Universal Windows)

Right click on Solution->Manage NuGet packages for solution

Find Microsoft.NETCore.UniversalWindowsPlatform and install it for the project in your solution

For Visual Studio 2017, make sure the VS Installer includes the SDK version you want to target. Choose IndividualComponents->SDKs , libraries, and frameworks:

You can see which versions you might have installed at C:Program Files (x86)Windows Kits10PlatformsUAP

The Universal App you create can run on any Windows platform, like Windows Desktop, Windows IOT, Windows Phone, Xbox, Hololens. It’s pretty easy to switch between debugging and running locally and on the Raspberry Pi.

You can use the Visual Studio MarketPlace (Tools->Extensions and Updates->Online) to search for “Window IoT Core Project Templates” (versions for both VS 2015 and 2017). This has a template to create a new C#->Windows->Windows IoTCore->Background Application, which is a program that runs on a headless Raspberry PI: one that has no display.

Building an app for Raspberry Pi is easier in a few ways than building for Arduino: the Arduino needs to be connected to the PC via USB to download programs (Yes, you can use Visual Studio to build and debug Arduino apps), whereas the Pi just needs to be anywhere on the (wireless) network.

You can use the Windows IOT Remote Client to see the screen of your IOT device. See these instructions. It allows you to use your Win 10 main machine running Visual Studio (or even a Windows Phone) to view the IOT device remotely. The Remote Client also allows touch, mouse and keyboard events to go to the Pi, even if there’s no screen attached to the IOT device.

See also https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/docs/buildingappsforiotcore