Micro Framework Book

I'm very pleased to be able to announce that I'm helping to writing a book about the .NET Micro Framework. The text will be primarly aimed at:

• experienced embedded developers who want to move into using C# and .NET in their devices
• experienced Windows C# programmers who want to use .NET technologies in embedded devices
• people who want to play with this cool technology and have fun

The new book has its own website, and we will be replicating some of the content from here on the new site, and posting examples of the content for folks out there to read and comment on.

We hope to have the book ready for early 2007. It is very nice to see that the technology is really coming along now, I've been playing with Beta 3 of the software and it works well.

.NET Micro Hardware Emerging

It is nice to see that .NET Micro Framework hardware is now starting to appear. I'll post links to the stuff as I find out more about it, for now you could do a lot worse than mosey on down here and here to take a look at the newest stuff (the latter one looks extremely droolworthy).

A First Program

The .NET Micro Framework exposes the hardware by means of an object model. This little snippet of code should give you some idea of how this works, and also how similar/identical the code looks to C# programs for PCs.

public static void Main()
{

    Microsoft.SPOT.Hardware.Cpu.Pin ledPin =
        Microsoft.SPOT.Hardware.Stamp.Pins.GPIO9_SER2_TDX;
 
    Microsoft.SPOT.Hardware.OutputPort ledOutput =
        new Microsoft.SPOT.Hardware.OutputPort(ledPin, true);
 
    while (true)
    {
        ledOutput.Write(false);
        System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(500);
        ledOutput.Write(true);
        System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(500);
    }
}

The program will simply flash a led connected to one of the pins.  An OutputPort instance is created from that pin and then methods on the instance are called to set the output high (true) and low (false). Note that the standard thread management code is used to pause the program for half a second after each change of state of the led.