News, news … news !

The waiting is over ! The first news of the new life of .Net Micro Framework have been announced publicly yesterday with the new SDK R2 Beta release for the 4.3 version.

Visual Studio 2013 ... but not only !

This release completely changes how the framework is installed on your PC using a VSIX package and ensuring support for multiple versions of Visual Studio also with syde by syde installation . This change provides the current support for Visual Studio 2013 (also with Express version) !

The downloaded zip file contains the MSI file for framework installation and three VSIX files that add projects template to three different supported versions of Visual Studio (2012, 2013 and “14”).

Indeed, the team has gone beyond providing a "light" support (for a simple "Hello World" application) also for the future Visual Studio "14".

The site has a new look

Another news is the complete re-styling of the official website dedicated to .Net Micro Framework starting from the home page. This is only the first step in a future enrichment of content and Microsoft also asks all developers to submit their own projects for the showcase.

The forum has been removed and all discussions are now on CodePlex (via the "Discussions") that is a single point of reference. This section is now divided in the following four subsections : Application Development, General, Porting and Showcase.

The next steps ...

The team is already working on future updates to include in the final release. First, the TCP/IP stack improvements as a result of the numerous problems and bugs identified and reported by the community. In addition, the debugging (currently very slow) and deployment problems will be solved too.

Open source and Community

As everyone knows, the .Net Micro Framework is open source for years, and now that Microsoft has decided to focus on it the community assumes an important role in the improvement of this product. The team of engineers that is working on it is part of the Microsoft Open Technologies and this also highlights the willingness to work closely with all the developers who create IoT and .Net Micro Framework based solutions.

Ultimately ... we are the .Net Micro Framework !