Microsoft's indirect answer to the Raspberry PI is their vision for the Internet of Things based on the .NET Micro Framework. This subset of the desktop and server based .NET Framework is intended to provide an easy way for existing .NET developers to leverage their skills on new micro-controller (and mini-PC) based devices. With this latest release (SDK 4.3.1 R2 Beta), developers can now use Visual Studio 2013 for their projects. The .NET Micro Framework has been open sourced by Microsoft under the Apache 2.0 License, allowing it to be freely used both hardware manufacturers and developers alike.
Adventurous developers may try using the Framework with Visual Studio “14” but this shouldn’t be done on a production system as both the Framework and “14” are beta. Visual Studio 2012 is also supported by this release, and the SDK will work in situations where multiple versions of Visual Studio are installed side-by-side. (The installer provides a specific VSIX file for each version of Visual Studio that you have installed on your system.)
With the broader IDE support now delivered, Microsoft’s Sal Ramirez reports that the team is working on improving networking support for the Framework. Many users have reported problems with various areas of the networking stack and Microsoft has been able to recreate some of these. No ETA is available for these fixes.
So far user reaction is mainly positive, but some users have asked for a switch in hosting from CodePlex to GitHub, and perhaps more importantly requested that development take place in a more transparent matter. For example, this release marks the first commit to the public repository in 2 months, meaning that all of the changes occurred without input from the general public and were then delivered en masse.
