This is my first time dabbling with setting up a device like this. Even though I have 25+ years of development (mainly web but some desktop) on Microsoft stack, plus a mechanical engineering background, it was still a bit daunting.
I did get the device setup and ran a “hello world” on it, although I had a few difficulties along the way.
Few things that I found during setup that would help in the “getting started” docs (apologies if these seem obvious to experienced users, but to me as a newbie, they weren’t!).
- The docs suggest Win32 Disk Imager as a tool for putting the .img on the SD card, but this doesn’t seem to work with Win11 (which I am running) and doesn’t seem to be any activity on their project to fix that. I tried with compatiblility mode and runing as Admin, but didn’t help. After looking at a lot of complex and paid alternatives, I found the Raspberry Pi imaging tool, which is free, works perfectly and is very simple to use.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-imager-imaging-utility/
There are three menus. I left the first as it was (no device selected), for the second go right to bottom to select the .img file, and for the last one, select the SD card location where you want to mount it. It worked first time and when I put the SD card in my Endpoint, it booted! (red led came on after few seconds).
I know maybe RP is a rival product, but this step of imaging the SD card held me up for too long and I wish I’d used the RP software from the start!
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The docs mention installing the “Endpoint Project System” from Visual Studio extensions, but when I searched, there is only something called “Endpoint Debugger”. I am pretty sure that is the same thing, but the different name given in the docs is confusing. I felt like I was missing something.
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The docs say to “create a new .NET 8 application” but doesn’t really specify what type, and having done desktop and web development, including with the older .NET framework, I have a lot of options of new project types to choose from. I did try a windows desktop one but got an error when trying to run it on the device. A console app works though. Not sure if it is possible to get other types running, I am thinking further down the line if I want to have some kind of screen and interface on the device.
When I get some more scaffolding in place and maybe a simple project to demo some basic features, I might stick it up on Github just so other newbs have something to clone to get started.
Overall though it was pretty simple, and a lot easier than a lot of command line stuff which seems to be required to set up other boards.