http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/internet-of-things.aspx
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Good timing…this may be a good resource for an upcoming talk…thanks for sharing!
Thanks for sharing.
Cloud first… 
The acronym should perhaps be IoBT (Internet of Big Things). The site is full of fluff, case studies, visionary possibilities, but no real concrete info on the path to get there or the technology to use. And what little I did find about “things” was POS (point of sale systems)… this whole movement smells of a new, bigger push of Windows Embedded, not NetMF. And Windows Embedded is “big”, nothing to do with tiny sensors, etc, hence my play on “IoBT”.
Waiting to be impressed by MS…
Yea, it is a little disappointing that all of the use cases are really big problems and not something that ordinary consumers can appreciate. But its understandable since those are the customers that are going to get the bills paid. I’m sure more will come but I see this as an opportunity for our community to lead the way. The nice thing about the Azure services is that they scale to any size and are very reasonably priced at any scale.
As soon as you see “Executive Summary” you can stop reading… this stuff is for folks whose title has Cxx or VP in it.
Yea, I didn’t read most it but I enjoyed watching the videos.
I would love to have a marketing department like that at my disposal. Very polished stuff, but fluffy for geeks.
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Yes, just management fluff.
Similar to the Intelligent Systems Service announcement earlier this year, which was similarly full of fluff and absent any tangible product.
Where is NetMF in this all new .NET Core approach?
@ dapug - Post in the comments and bring up NETMF, most of the comments seemed to just be MS haters talking the normal crap.
It isn’t, and it won’t be. To constrain Core to what could be implemented on a microcontroller would be to create a Core that is too limited to be useful in the general case.
@ godefroi, agreed. But NetMF needs to be a part of the overall story and not a 3rd step-child with little or no mention. Especially now, as MS claims to focus on IoT (claim to be the best, in fact) AND are changing how they organize .NET all together… they need to show the full picture.
Microsoft’s IoT strategy is Azure. NETMF is useful to them only as a driver to Azure. It’s a very small driver, so it forms a very small part of the story.
My guess is, whoever put this website together has never heard of NETMF. Certainly, NETMF has no marketing dollars.
But at the same time you can run full .net framework (mono) on boards with linux.
Not tried yet, but as i know it’s works on beagle bone, raspberry pi, olinuxino with imx233 and allwinner mcu’s.
Compared to NetMF you got JIT, AOT, Interop to native libraries, full C#, full functional ASP.NET server, DB and more features.
Good example, libulldog Java library http://libbulldog.org/bulldog/ let you use Java to access low level peripherals. I don’t think that would be a problem to port it to C#.
Mono requires Linux, Linux requires an MMU (Memory Management Unit). The boards you mentioned all have MMUs, which means that they can run Linux, which means that they can run Mono.
Note that just because you can run Mono on a platform doesn’t necessarily mean that you can run .NET Core.
It’s not a problem of lack of managed access to peripherals, it’s a problem of Mono requiring an OS, and OSs requiring MMUs, and microcontrollers don’t have MMUs, because if it has an MMU, it isn’t generally categorized as a microcontroller.
Microsoft announced that they will be extending to support Linux. Also access to .Net code base will improve Mono.
Some NETMF devices contains MCU that not categorized as a microcontroller :).
For lower devices i think NETMF is not the best choice and actually on most lower MCU’s NetMF is not capable to run.
My point was about performance, convenience and hardware costs for complex projects. Where make sense to use high level languages or frameworks.
A lot of the MS .NET code is available for quite a while now.
But the MONO team advised their contributors to not even look at it, so MS can not claim any copy right issues.
Of course, the Open Source aspect might change this a little bit, but there still might be legal issues.
@ Reinhard Ostermeier
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/12/04/introducing-net-core.aspx
[quote]Many of you asked what the .NET Core cross platform story means for Mono. The Mono project is essentially an open source re-implementation of the .NET Framework. As such, it shares the richness of the APIs with the .NET Framework but it also shares some of its problems, specifically around the implementation factoring.
Mono is alive and well with a large ecosystem on top. That’s why, independent of .NET Core, we also released parts of the .NET Framework Reference Source under an open source friendly license on GitHub. This was done to allow the Mono community to close the gaps between the .NET Framework and Mono by using the same code. However, due to the complexity of the .NET Framework we’re not setup to run it as an open source project on GitHub. In particular, we’re unable to accept pull requests for it.[/quote]
I think the problem related not to the legal issues, but code complexity.
“Mono” in my opinion is more mature and more advanced framework compared to NetMF.
And at that point as i see only problem with it, is low level hardware library.
Linux on ARM, for example? I doubt it. I sincerely doubt .NET Core would run on the rpi, for example, any time soon, while Mono has run on it for a long time.