Sunday, July 5, 2009

Microsoft .Net Micro Framework

To prove I have nothing against Microsoft per se, today I'll talk about something I was really glad to find: Microsoft .Net Micro Framework.


Although I often criticize lots of MS products and decisions, I won't deny there are lots of good things MS has accomplished over the years. Visual Studio and .Net framework being some of them; setting a standard for programming environments that all others are compared to.

Now, this .Net Micro framework edition allows us to take that easy and fast programming to much smaller devices:
The typical .NET Micro Framework device has a 32 bit processor with no external memory management unit (MMU) and could have as little as 64K of random-access memory (RAM).
Which suits devices like these:





Smallest Footprint64KB RAM, 256KB Flash
Processor
  • ARM7 (with or without MMU)
  • ARM Cortex M3
  • ARM9
  • ADI BlackFin
Real-time OS.NET Micro Framework is not real-time, but can be hosted on a real-time OS as an option
Application development
  • Managed code using Visual Studio 2008 and C#
  • Native C/C++ code interop capabilities
Tools
  • Visual Studio 2008 + .NET MF SDK: application development
  • Visual Studio 2008 + .NET MF Porting Kit + native platform compiler: interop and custom BSPs
Support
  • 10-year product support life cycle
  • Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN)
  • Partner resources / ecosystem


If you're working on embedded programming, you'll want to give it a look.

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