I haven’t found official documentation on this anywhere so I thought I’d write up my own quick notes which I can replace when I find the right web pages to link to – I’ve seen quite a few people talk about the portal that’s present on both IoT Core and on Windows Mobile and I’m assuming on Surface Hub but I haven’t checked that last one at the time of writing.

By way of rough notes…

I’m currently on a mixture of wired/WiFi networking where I have my Surface Pro 3 development machine on a wired network along with a Raspberry PI 2 running Windows IoT Core and a Windows Mobile 10 device (my phone) which connects to the same network but over WiFi.

If I use the IoT Dashboard application then it shows me a couple of devices on my network;

and so it’s showing both my PI and my phone.

If I use the “Open Device Portal” on the Raspberry PI 2 then a browser opens;

with the portal for the IoT core device and I can use this to manage aspects of the device as per the list on the left hand side of the screen – specifically, I can use this to add/remove/stop/start apps and I can use it to set up networking and bluetooth devices.

If you’ve seen me talk about IoT Core in public then you’ll have seen me talk my way through this portal and show a few things.

What I’ve never shown in public (AFAIK) though is what happens if I use the “Open Device Portal” on my phone. In the first instance, I see an error;

but I can fix that by losing the :8080 port on the address here although (right now) I still find myself with a warning;

but if I go around that I get to;

and this leads over to the pages on the phone where I can set all of this up. As you can see, I have the device in developer mode;

and you’ll notice that I have “Device discovery” switched on here;

and that it says that this is available over both USB and WiFi, that I have no devices paired and that the portal is also switched on and advertising itself at http://192.168.0.11.

If I then go through that ‘Pair’ process on the phone, I get a code;

which I can then type into the web page and I’m then onto the portal on the device and here’s the phone portal side by side with the IoT Core portal;

and from that Phone portal I can then go and add/remove/stop/start apps and I can look at performance, networking and so on for the phone just like I can on IoT Core device.

What I’d really like to do is to also be able to debug here over WiFi without having to connect a USB cable and I don’t know at the time of writing whether I can do that or not.

If I unplug the USB cable then Visual Studio certainly sees the device as a remote target over the network if I use the Universal authentication mode;

but attempting to deploy using this mechanism ends up in me being prompted for a PIN;

and I don’t seem to be able to provide any type of PIN here that makes the phone play nicely with me so I’m not sure whether this is just because I don’t know how to provide the right PIN or whether there isn’t a PIN that will work here right now.

Let me know if you know and I’ll update the post.