We will keep fixing issues as they come along and move Alljoyn to production quality later this year. Please try out the release and let us know your feedback!

We call this project LLILUM, we pronounce it 'lillium', and the repo is located here. Please explorer our wikis for internals and proposed directions, and let us know what you think.

Next stop is RTM by end of August, or slightly after.

Another thing that has happened in the last eight months is that we have built the team back up to levels that we have not seen in years.  This includes bringing Lorenzo Tessiore back on the development side as the technical lead for the project.   For those who don't know, Lorenzo has been with the project since its inception. 

All this brings us to a point where I can complete my plans that I put off to spend this period back on NETMF.   Today is my last day at Microsoft as I move into retirement.  This product has allowed me to work on great projects with great people both inside and outside of Microsoft.    I have been blessed with a great career in the industry and working on small devices has been the best part of it all.  I'll turn this blog over to Lorenzo who will follow up with more info on version 4.4 and the AOT project and what the timing on that will be. 

Best of luck to all of you. 

Colin

Thanks

In addition to the labs, there is a NETMF demo in Steve Teixeira's IoT keynote on Window's IoT Core.   Unfortunately, this demo, which had been solid all week, failed on stage.  For some reason, the phone lost the Alljoyn connection.  The way the demo did work is that he 'ask's' a Windows phone whether there are any NETMF devices present.   When it relies that there are, he asks for the temperature in the room and it tells him the temperature. Finally he tells the NETMF device to send that data to the TV.   The temperature shows up on the TV display.   There are several interesting technologies in this demo.  First, the communication is set up using Alljoyn.  In 4.4, NETMF will have an implementation of the AllJoyn Thin Client.   Microsoft is a member of the Allseen alliance and Alljoyn will be support in all of the Microsoft platforms.  Alljoyn allows for devices to 'advertise' their presence and their 'type' and for other devices to find and consume the services that they offer.   With Alljoyn supported on all the Microsoft platforms and a growing number of other devices like the LG TV we used, setting up flexible and dynamic connections between devices is really easy.  This same demo that is in Steve's talk is in a booth dedicated to the Alljoyn story at Microsoft. 

The other technology that I think is killer is the voice support in Windows 10.  Steve made a call to not utilize the Cortana portion of the demo in his talk because there had been so much already shown on Cortana but I think this is something of particular interest in small devices.  UI is often a challenge on these devices.   You may decide to not have any UI on your device but that misses the opportunity to impact it's functioning externally or to query it.   You could elect to put buttons and LEDs on it but that is an inflexible option and not that informative.   You could opt to put a touch display on the device.  This improves the flexibility of the interface but it is also expensive.  Voice is extremely flexible and as easy to change as modifying the Voice Command Definition in XML.   There is not any explicit support for voice or Cortana in NETMF yet but with the voice capabilities on a Windows phone and Alljoyn, it is easy to implement this kind of command and control where small devices are integrated with higher end platforms. 

During Channel 9 interviews, Pete Brown and Steve Teixeira highlighted the work that GHI is doing to improve the Raspberry Pi connectivity to modules and the new Netduino boards. 

What does all this add up to?   For a number of years, the Microsoft platform story was fragmented.  There was Windows, Mobile, Windows Compact Edition, and NETMF as separate platforms specific to their target devices.  These platforms were even in different organizations inside Microsoft further fragmenting the messaging.  Now all of these technologies are in the OSG group with the direct intention of creating a powerful IoT platform suite.   With UAP (now UWP) and architectural work in Windows core, the current story is Windows Standard, Windows Mobile, Windows IoT Core, and NETMF- three of the platforms are built from the same code.  In the NETMF team very focused at this point to making sure that our platform for the processors that can't run one of the full OS options is still highly compatible and well integrated with them.   Our two goals going forward are convergence with the rest of Windows development experience and increasing the range of applications that Microsoft has solutions for in the MCU space by increasing our performance and decreasing our memory requirements. We continue to build the team to do all this with a larger investment than the platform has had in years.   

Let us know what your thoughts are on all these changes.  We're looking forward to an exciting year.

* I am using the UAP acronym because it is probably more familiar to everyone but with \\Build, this has been renamed to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP)

The Quail board is made up of the STM32, 8MB Flash, RTC, 4 ‘click’ module sockets, 24 screw terminals (GPIO, SPI, I2C,..), and several USB ports including one for USB sticks. The purpose of the Quail board lines up perfectly with NETMF as they say themselves – “The core idea behind Quail was to empower embedded developers with the same modern tools and technologies used by those who develop desktop applications. On the flip-side, Quail also allows desktop .NET programmers to delve into the world of hardware development, with ease.”

The Quail board is can be purchased at https://www.mikroe.com/quail/ for $49 and they ship worldwide.   MikroBUS.NET offers board customization services to fit your needs.  Now this is a really impressive set of modules – on rough count over 100.  You can peruse them at https://www.mikroe.com/click/ .   There are all of your old favorites plus many that you may not have seen.   Have you needed to measure Hall effects?   They have several that do that.  Ever wanted to interface with fiber optics?   They have that covered.   How about integrating speech recognition? And the ThunderClick module that "detects the presence and proximity of potentially hazardous lightning activity in the vicinity and provides estimated distance to the center of the storm."   I really enjoyed going through the list and thinking about the projects that I still have to do.  Fortunately, I will have to try out this board as soon as I can get an order in so keep an eye out and I will share my experience as soon as I’m done. IOh, and if you are worried that you wont be able to use up all the fun modules you find with the four connectors on the quail board, as long as you pay attention to the documentation on the pins used by each module, you can stack them.  https://youtu.be/HB5EHtOLjp0

Here is what the MikroBus.NET team wants you to know about themselves:

• All our drivers and core assembly are open-source and      pure NETMF
• We provide free support on our forum
• We have some very nice software features like Virtual Sockets and the Storage class
• We are starting to add drivers for Gadgeteer modules sold by GHI, thanks to our G-Adapters (by the way, 2 or 3 more drivers will be added this week)
• We can design custom NETMF boards if needed

In conjunction with the move, we have done some cleaning up.   The binaries have been separated out so the syncing the code is less costly.  The old NETMF versions have not been brought across - only the current working version is on GitHub.   We have cleaned up some of the Hal and PAL configurations.

On the functional side, this release includes the reworked network stack integration that improves the stability of the connections.  This work is dependent on the CMSIS APIs and these libraries are not included in this code and will have to be acquired separately.  In addition, there are improvements in the debugging and deployment functionality and stability.  For example, single stepping and updating the Watch window now takes a fraction of the previous time.  More features are in the works including AllJoyn support and the start of WinRT APIs and VS 2015 support.

These initial betas allow the really intrepid folks to get their hands dirty and see what is coming and uncover any issues with deployment on their hardware.  We'd love to hear your feedback on the code and the GitHub integration.