Microsoft .NET MicroFramework
When I looked at the next session slot I stumbled upon a new topic that I had neither seen nor even heard of before, the Microsoft .NET MicroFramework. Now what's that?
Chad Hower started out by telling a joke. Companies today are being forced to hire people of all races, religions and beliefs. So this company hires three cannibals. When they were hired, the were explicitly told that they could not eat anyone from the company as that would not be accepted! Everything goes fine for the next three months. Then suddenly one of t he secretaries goes missing. The company holds a metting, asking the cannibals, "OK, which one of you did it?". We didn't do it boss, the cannibals answered. Later that night the cannibals had a meeting. "OK, which one of you guys did it? We've been eating managers for the last three months without getting caught, why the hell did you have to eat one of the productive people?".
The session started great. The MicroFramework is a really, really, really lightweight CLR that'll run .NET code. It's meant for embedded devices with limited RAM, CPU and power. The MicroFramework CLR has a footprint of only 200-400kb, requiring an absolute minimum of memory. Also it takes care of factors such as running the application from Flash memory (In contrast to ordinary hard drives, Flash memory has a limited life span, a limited number of read cycles. This means we have to distribute the data throughout the whole flash memory, else we're going to burn out the first half of the disk before having even used the last half).
After this little promising intro the session kinda stalled. Chad was a great speaker, but for the next 50 minutes it wasn't really a demonstration, it was a brainstorming of what we might use the MicroFramework for. We got around blimps, coffee machines, digital photo frames, MP3 players and lots of other small embedded devices. After having brainstormed for the first 10 minutes, I'm pretty sure everbody got the point. But we continued.
The MicroFramework definitely brings opportunities to the embedded device developer, but it seems as if there really isn't that much technical info out yet, at least not enough for a one and a half session. Also the MicroFramework isn't officially out yet, you'll have to plead your case to the development team to receive a beta version that you can try out.
See here for more information about the Microsoft .NET MicroFramework.