Actually this move is really good for Gadgeteer as now its out of the lab per say and moved to an area which is king in electronic manufacturing so Gadgeteer should be taking a step up in visibility which has been a concern for some time. The lab guys will continue doing work on Gadgeteer and embedded devices as growth areas for Microsoft. Some of these projects were money makers (really savers) on their own being implemented at Microsoft, so no doubt we will see those continue to progress as external products. Of course monetization of Gadgeteer and IoT in general will remain an issue for the near future but that is industry wide problem that we will just have to grind through.
Now I would agree that Gadgeteer has gone through a bit of a rough spot lately where some key components haven’t been as reliable or consistent as they should have been, but I would suspect that is a priority for this new group, but I also suspect fixes will take a bit of time, but they could score some easy points by quickly bagging a couple of pain points.
@ Justin you might want to check if your passport is up for a trip to China (shots etc are recommended as well).
@ jernejk - I think you misunderstood something, I am not sure?
We are elaborating on MS strategy and effort on the NETMF platform. Where the download points to, and how slow the rest of the world takes up new code is another interesting topic …
[quote]Jianmin 7 Nov 2013 10:14 PM #
MF was moved to China as a maintenance project. US dev team is gone. Not likely to see much future development.[/quote]
I have no idea who Jianmin is or how accurate his comment is, he isn’t the official guy from MS who started the thread. However, I’ve got a lot of time and energy invested in getting up to speed on C# and .Net Micro and would be really interested in comments on Jianmin’s comment from others more knowledgeable than me.
I personally will be sticking with netmf and building new hardware as i think it will survive and the benefits to me of the ide and c# outweigh anything else.
@ Justin - And as mentioned above, if MS drops it anyone could continue it.
Would not be the 1st community driven project.
I would be in, as far as my time allows it.
Personally I would work a bit toward more code capability to big .net, if it’s no performance problem.
Currently I do not see an urgent need for that. 4.2 works fine for me in personal and commercial products.
This does not mean that it could need some fresh input.
Anyway, for GHI Premium products GHI would also need to adopt a new version then.
Community driven projects tend to do many releases. I’m sure GHI would not integrate every new subversion into a new premium FW.
I’m not sure if GHI would be able to separate NETMF and GHI part of the FW, so you could use any 4.4.x of NETMF (which has to be interface compatible to any other 4.4.x) with any GHI 4.4.x FW.
May be there could be an official GHI FW with a specific NETMF version, and some “use at own risk” versions with newer NETMF.
But that’s just the fantasies of a (not really) grownup boy who always wants to have the latest, coolest, fancies, … features (and gets mad if it does not work then) :whistle:
But in fact I can understand you:
As long as someone from MS says: Expect something in near future, and then nothing happens, can be quite frustrating. It also does not make a good first impress on potential new community members.
@ Reinhard Ostermeier that was Bill’s Albuquerque mug shot so I’m not so sure about the ‘innocent’ thing.
Microsoft moves NetMF to China, where else would they move it to, where is the manufacturing? While GHI is a glorious anomaly that I’ve often pointed out to people as an example of ‘taking back’ some Chinese manufacturing, the point remains most of the hardware is Chinese so dropping NetMF/Gadgeteer in the middle of it was and still is a good idea. Now of course the Chinese will take their usually forever to get up to speed as despite their claims, they really aren’t as good as they think they are, but still we are dumb enough to believe that they are everything they claim to be, so its a toss up really who is to blame. I know there is one other person on this forum who know that MS uses NetMF and Gadgeteer internally (more then you would think), so Microsoft isn’t walking out the door anytime soon on NetMF or Gadgeteer, but like every other sector of IoT there is a poop or get off the pot thing going on, lots of expectations, grunting and groaning, but really not much in terms of results as its still mostly the land of hobbyists (not that is bad, but its just how its been for years so there really hasn’t been the growth or change that has been expected). Now really this is how things work as ideas and companies are never overnight successes unless you happen to be able to sleep for a couple of years at a time, so the plan here is to continue to continue (I might have lost a small boat load of money on UrtheCast yesterday, but stuff that is really interesting is rarely easy and that is the barrier of entry to cool ideas, so we hit a problem and now to work a solution). Gadgeteer is in need of success stories that go beyond ‘look at the cool device I built’, but so is every other device platform. So many cool devices, but almost none beyond the ‘one of’ phase. So here is the problem, how to take a prototype and go production, now work the solution and I think the module design of Gadgeteer has the easiest path to a solution, but to the victor belong the spoils and to the defeated the cruel pages of history.
Waiting for FedEx to arrive so I can build even more cool stuff and maybe one day go production with one.
@ andre.m I don’t think its just a matter of Gadgeteer needs success stories, the industry in general needs some success stories including Arduino, RaspberryPi, etc. as far as the IoT aspect is concerned for example. We have lots of success stories in terms of the hobbyist building cool devices and even have a number of those posted in the local Showcase and Codeshare folders (and a bunch in my office even). The problem is ‘the next step’, how to get the hobby to a product and those are the success stories that I’m talking about (the goal is to create what Bill Gates called the positive upward spiral). Now for someone like Microsoft, not a problem as they have buckets of money to do that (and most of their Gadgeteer projects are in support of Research Projects which aren’t slated for public consumption for some time, but no device means the research stops cold, so Gadgeteer is very important for them), I’m specifically talking about taking the hobby prototype built using whatever (but I prefer Gadgeteer of course) to manufacture of 100’s or 1000’s and then beyond. The reason I’m talking such low numbers is the goal is for a hobbyist to self fund their growth, if you want to deal with VC or otherwise investors, be my guest, but I’d rather avoid them where possible and I think it should be possible here (I’m meeting with a bunch of investors mid-January to help them understand IoT and show off Gadgeteer a bit, want me to put a bug in their ear, let me know).
We have some members in this forum who have hit this problem, such I can bake up a couple of boards, but more then that takes too much time and the creative process they love gets run over by the time intensive manual process of manufacturing. Even the creation of the production board is problematic, I have a Gadgeteer prototype, now what, how do I convert a mainboard and a handful of modules into a single production board. First platform to do that is going to own this market space (I think and hope it would be Gadgeteer). Arduino, RaspberryPi, mbed, etc all have these problems, but Gadgeteer’s approach should give it the advantage in going from prototype to product, so we need to bust through that straw ceiling with some projects and really get the Gadgeteer ball rolling.
@ Duke Nukem - Microsoft didn’t move NETMF to China because that’s where the manufacturing is. If that were true, then Windows would be developed in China as well, along with all the other software they produce.
You also overlooked that essentially none of the NETMF hardware currently in active production (GHI and Secret Labs) is produced in China.
Further, how many millions of Pi boards have been sold now? My guess is that they sell as much (in $$ terms) per month as NETMF/Gadgeteer has ever sold, ever. I think they found their success story.
[quote=“Reinhard Ostermeier”] I get the feeling that it’s the common sense nowadays.
[/quote]
I get the feeling its a lack of “common sense”… How could the most successful software company in history possibly have any idea about what they’re doing???
