This from Microsoft

http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/s...leID=197005873

leads to this
http://www.embeddedfusion.com/default.aspx?id=76
http://www.embeddedfusion.com/default.aspx?id=64
- claims ~35x35mm module, and says this

"The most notable aspect of the .NET Micro Framework is that it does not
need any underlying operating system. The Micro Framework requires very
little in the way of system resources thus reducing the overall cost of
a system. (The minimum memory resources are about 384K of FLASH/ROM and
256K of RAM)"

Any one used this ? - the claims of 384KF/256KR on one page and
512KF/256KR on another, do not say what that is capable of running,
nor minimul program sizes. Speed is also not discussed.

If this downloads/runs MSIL instructions, pgms should be relatively small.

This is not that far above present single chip resource.
Flash is well past 384/512KF, on top end devices, but few devices
currently have 256KR.
Some of this could move into ROM.

This could change the resorce targets for chip release ?

-jg

"Jim Granville" <no.spam@designtools.maps.co.nz> skrev i meddelandet
news:45d35ba1$1@clear.net.nz...
Since this is MS first attempt at an RTOS for non-MMU machines,
my guess is that the 256 kB will provide you with a simple round-robin
scheduler (no preemptive multitasking) and non-nestable interrupts.
If you want to add any actual applications, then memory needs will grow ;-)



--
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
This is intended to be my personal opinion which may,
or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

Ulf Samuelsson <ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com> wrote:
There is nothing realtime about the .NET Mircro Framework their FAQ even
states.

"Given the high clock speeds of the underlying hardware the lack of
real time support is not a major problem."

You have to write in C# as far as I can tell, other languages targeting the
CLR are not supported. Download and debug is over serial ports not JTAG.

Accorind to this:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/02/.NET-Micro

It doesn't support JITing, it's not clear if it even executes CLR byte code,
the link could be taken either way. It does appear to allow you to write
native methods though.

You have to have Visual Studio 2005 to use it.

-p
--
"Unix is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are."
- Anonymous
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Paul Gotch wrote:
No RT, C#, VS, MS. With all those strikes against it, why should
anyone ever consider using it? You know that anything from MS is
buggy, and will not be supported.

--
<http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt>
<http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/423>

"A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much."
-- Francis Crick, co-discover of DNA
"There is nothing more amazing than stupidity in action."
-- Thomas Matthews

On Feb 14, 8:55 pm, CBFalconer <cbfalco...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Microsoft's support of .NET has been extremely thorough. They have
gone far beyond anyone's expectations, and they even have regional
support centers where they offer free assistance to developers. I've
rattled their cage on more than one occasion.

They took to heart all of the criticism they got up through the 80's
and 90's, and the company turned around in 2001. They're now far more
open, and they're well connected with developers. Microsoft employees
are also active in the newsgroups.

It remains to be see if they understand MCUs, but this looks positive
to me.

Eric

Jim Granville <no.spam@designtools.maps.co.nz> writes:
384K (or 512K) ROM and 256K RAM is "very little in the way
of system resources"?!? Compared to what?

They'll have to be small to be shoehorned into the machine
after M$ has usurped all the resources.

On Feb 14, 6:39 pm, Paul Gotch <p...@at-cantab-dot.net> wrote:

They way I understand it, they have a new kind of IL that was designed
to be interpreted. It reminds me of the DotGNU project: they translate
IL into a new dialect of IL that is more friendly to interpretation,
and they have a runtime interpreter to run that. The "full" IL for
PC's lacks the kind of type information you'd need to execute it
quickly with an interpreter (the JIT compiler gets the type info from
various metadata). For example, the IL instruction to add 2 values
doesn't specify the size of the operands (unlike Java's JVM
bytecodes).

Yes, I'm guessing the free Express version won't work with it. I
believe that is also the case for the CE platform. However, you
probably only need VS for debugging, or for rich designtime
functionality. Microsoft normally allows people to develop apps with
Notepad, or third-party tools. It comes down to a question of
deployment, and I am guessing that can also be done outside of VS
since they are just using a serial port.

By the way, their serial port support in CE is quite good, so I expect
the same here. It shouldn't have the slow klunky feeling that Arm's
Angel monitor had when debugging over a serial port. It should be
pretty responsive. If it's not responsive it will quickly die in the
developer marketplace.

Eric

On Feb 14, 1:59 pm, Jim Granville <no.s...@designtools.maps.co.nz>
wrote:
This looks like a low cost dev board for the Micro Framework. This
runs at 200 Mhz and has 2, USB host mode interfaces, and an Ethernet
port. It can also run linux. It doesn't have an LCD, but this looks
like a steal for the money.

http://www.emacinc.com/sbc_microcont.../ipac_9302.htm

Freescale also has a dev kit, and it also has an LCD - is this the
same as the one from Embedded Fusion? Note that the USB is only 1.1
and it's not a host interface. I don't know if they have a linux
option, but Freescale is linux-friendly with some of their other
boards. It runs only at 100 Mhz. Sadly, this does not use the new
Cortex A8 that Freescale is supposed to be working on.

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/...gQ8217297301A5

Eric

Eric wrote:
C# by itself is a turn-off. It does not have an ISO standard. MS
drops more things than my cat has kittens.

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Eric <englere_geo@yahoo.com> wrote:
Standard Edition required.

I think they've unified it so you just now need VS 2005 and don't need VS
Embedded which was in effect a previous version of VS retargetted.

I think there is still a separate kernel debugger though.

Depends if the they've docmented the protocol spoken to the monitor, MS are
notorious for keeping such things closed so they can change them.

Angel was written back in the days of 9600 Kbaud serial ports, it had been
superceeded by JTAG based debugging by the time there was any need to make
it go faster or hide the latency of the serial port.

To me this seems to be a "because we can product" though. To make it go
anywhere they need a huge library of support libraries supporting the
facilities available on common microcontrollers and they need to add JTAG
debugging.

Otherwise it doesn't really provide anything you can't do with existing C
based toolkits from incumbant vendors and it requires oodles more RAM and
faster processors.

Another point is that with the C based tool kits you at least have the
illusion of being able to change tools providers even if in practice it's
very hard, the .NET stuff is essentially single source single toolchain.

-p
--
"Unix is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are."
- Anonymous
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Everett M. Greene wrote:
Those are Microsoft's press release words, so they will mean compared
with Vista!

-jg

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 14:15:11 -0500, CBFalconer <cbfalconer@yahoo.com>
wrote:

http://standards.iso.org/ittf/Public...70_2006(E).zip

--
Al Balmer
Sun City, AZ

"Eric" <englere_geo@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1171561289.132101.307330@v33g2000cwv.googlegr oups.com...
If they understood the criticism then why did they produce anything .NET for
embedded..

perhaps this is their next attempt having not learnt from the failure of
CE..

LOL

Al Balmer <albalmer@att.net> wrote:
Not Found

The requested URL
/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c036768_ISO_IEC_23270_2003(E).zip was not
found on this server.
Apache/2.0.55 (Win32) Server at standards.iso.org Port 80

Seriously that standard is for C# 1 and 2 which has now been superceeded by C#
3. TThere is an EMCA standard for C# 3 but it's not been through ISO yet.

The big difference between the C# standard and the sya the C++ standard is
that the C# standard essentially only defines the language and there is only
enough standard library to contain standard exceptions. In contrast a large
amount of the C++ standard defines what the standard library contains.

It is therefore possible to do quite a bit with portable C++ which will
compile with any conformant compiler.

Generally C# is used with the CLI class library which is itself
standardised. However like the full C++ class library it's huge and with an
interpreted language you don't get the option of throwing most of it away at
link time.

Even in cut down form (MS say they don't implement all of it) I suspect
this is what most of the 250K-1MB foot print of the thing is given it's
possible to write the bytecode interpreter in a few K.

-p
--
"Unix is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are."
- Anonymous
--------------------------------------------------------------------

On Feb 15, 6:07 pm, "TheDoc" <the...@future-solar.com> wrote:

I completely understand what you're saying, and I have always laughed
at Microsoft's usage of the word "embedded" because it seemed to me
that they didn't understand the meaning of the word. I don't like CE
myself, but I love C# and .NET on the Windows platform.

But recently I saw a list of RTOS makers and market share, and it
shocked me to see that CE is a huge success! This is mostly due to
smart phones and pocket PC's, but even then, those do qualify as
embedded devices. And it was a shock to me that a lot of industrial
controllers also use CE. I never really noticed this firsthand.

Nobody is going to stop their C/C++ work immediately now that the
Micro Framework is coming. But it will find a niche and it will be
successful. And I will play with it, but I don't expect to win many
contracts to develop commercial applications for it over the next year
or two. The lack of USB and Ethernet support in the initial release of
MF will be a serious limitation, but I'm sure they'll fix that in
version 2 or 3. The only way to use USB and Ethernet in version 1 will
be through platform invoke of native code (calling C/C++ in other
words). I understand the same is true of CF cards.

Eric

On Feb 15, 4:28 pm, Paul Gotch <p...@at-cantab-dot.net> wrote:
Well said. I can't imagine why they don't seem to know anything about
JTAG.The third party libs will definitely come out over time. In the
embedded world you need libs from companies that specialize in this
market because of the low level complexities.

I think they're pushing the faster development time, and more
reliability due to managed memory.

Since the compilers are free, both from MS and the mono project, there
are several other companies that make IDEs, and the open source Sharp
Develop is very good now. There's even a C# addin for Eclipse. You
don't hear about the alternatives much because Visual Studio really is
very good. The IDE is much better than IAR or Keil/Arm IDEs, at least
in a general sense when we not talking about embedded debugging. I'm
not going to put away IAR when it comes to low-level bits and bytes,
at least not in the foreseeable future.

There are many third-party companies that market components and libs
for .NET. None of that will apply to the Micro Framework, but I'll
possibly join the fray of releasing some MF specific components before
long.

Eric

Paul Gotch wrote:
That link worked for me, but my email client truncated the URL at the
first parenthesis. Make sure the "(E).zip" ending is there.

Related to the original post:
"Introduction to Programming for the TinyCLR" (
http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/84123.htm )

I have no experience-based-opinion on the subject, ( I am beginning
work on my first Windows CE project, ) but like CBFalconer I don't
hear the words "Microsoft" and "embedded" creating a beautiful harmony
when sung together.

Roberto Waltman

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