Expert .NET Micro Framework

It all started at Microsoft’s European Mobile and Embedded Developers Conference (MEDC Europe) 2006 in Nice, France. At this event, I saw the .NET Micro Framework presented for the first time in a session by Jonathan Kagle and Lorenzo Tessiore. As a .NET programmer for desktop and smart device applications, I was impressed by the idea of being able to program embedded microcontrollers with my everyday development tool and programming language: Microsoft Visual Studio and C#. I got a CD with the not-yet-released .NET Micro Framework SDK 1.0 from Lorenzo after the presentation; the emulator it included was not customizable and was built specifically for the Sumo Robot contest that took place at the conference. The contest’s goal was to program a Sumo robot (a small robot supporting the .NET Micro Framework) with Visual Studio and C# so that it was intelligent enough to react to sensor input and push an enemy from the battlefield. Instead of going to the beach in Nice in the evening, I stayed in my hotel room and tweaked the software development kit’s (SDK’s) emulation mechanism to launch my own emulator. My first emulator just indicated the activity of a general purpose input/output (GPIO) port on the emulator’s user interface using a check box. This allowed me to write my first .NET Micro Framework application, which toggled a GPIO port, and run it on my first emulator.