.NET Micro Framework

The book is now officially done and off to the presses!  It will be available in approximately one month!  (Mike Hall blogged about it recently - thanks Mike!)

Also, an excerpt from the book has been published in the .NET Developer's Journal - so be sure and check it out!

Rob and I will be at TechEd 2007.  Rob is delivering a talk on the .NET Micro Framework (along with Roger Wolff, one of the lead developers on .NET MF).  Hope to see you there!

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.

I have had to put on hold the chapter on the Extensible Emulator (Chapter 8) I have been working on over the holidays due to some fairly big DCRs (Design Change Requests) that were approved to the feature.  This means I now have rather thorough documentation of the way things used to work.  Things are expected to change rather dramatically for the RTM version of the SDK, so I need to hold off until I get my hands on the new bits.  Moving right along...

I just submitted a draft of Chapter 2 - Getting Started (I'm late due to the day job...), where we describe how to create one's first .NET MF application.  It is intended primarily for those that are fairly new to Visual Studio and highlights the integration we've done on the framework with some of its tools and features.  It takes a very gentle approach to getting your hands dirty.

Rob is nearly done with Chapters 3 & 4 (where we kick it up a few notches with some real projects)...