.NET Micro Framework

If you are looking for a good resource for the .NET Micro Framework, and you also want to keep abreast of developments, then head over to the Micro Framework team blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/netmfteam/

It has some very good hardware articles too.

It has been a while since we posted here, but things in the .NET Micro Framework are still moving along nicely, with even more devices arriving.

Many thanks to all of you who have bought the book, the sales have been very encouraging and we hope you find it useful. One issue has been reported, which is that there is an error in the GPS example in the download files. I've posted a fixed version of the code in my set of files from the TechEd presetations that we gave in Barcelona in early November. You can find it here.

http://www.robmiles.com/storage/teched-2007/TechEd%20Demos.zip

Many apologies for the problem, and kudos to Jon Hanson for spotting the mistake.

You might like to know that as well as presenting a TechEd session I'll also be helping with a webcast which will be based on the session materials. So if you can't make it out to Florida you can find out what all the fuss is about by signing up for that and taking part. I can reveal that I will be telling a brand new joke as part of the presentation, which is worth the price of admission alone.

Oh, and admission to the webcast is free.

You may have been wondering where we have been for the last couple of months. The answer is simple. We've been writing. The good news is that all the text for the book is now "in", which means that we just have to go through the production process to get the book out there.

Once we have some production ready material we will be updating the sample chapters section and the table of contents and providing you with something to get your teeth into.

If you like eating books about the .NET Micro Framework that is.....

One of the fun things about writing texts like this is that we get to dream up ideas for funky (there's that word again) devices and then build them. As part of this I've come up with the "Flashlight for the Fiftieth Century" which is .NET Micro Framework controlled, flashes so that you can find it in the dark (always a good thing for a flashlight to do) and also performs data logging, so that you can tell how much you have used it... It is unlikely that anyone will actually want a flashlight like this, but you never know... and it does provide a nice framework to show of bits of the, er, Framework.

Today I decided to make the flashlight location aware, so that you can find out where people have been taking it. Perfect for keeping track of your night watchmen. To do this I've added a GPS component, so that the flashlight can pick up the data stream, decode it and log the coordinate information. This has been great fun. I've just about got the serial stuff working, and through the wonders of the emulator I'm actually able to feed live location data from a GPS device connected to my PC into the Micro Framework code running inside Visual Studio 2005. If all goes well (and I don't see why it shouldn't) I can get all the code working on the PC before I need to go near any hardware at all. Wonderful stuff.

For readers of the book, this means that you will be able to pick up a GPS NMEA decoder as one of the worked examples too, which will be nice.