In the MSDN Magazine September 2014 there is an article called “Soup to Nuts: From Raw Hardware to Cloud-Enabled Device”. Interesting article but would be more interesting if a .NetMF device featured instead of a Raspberry Pi.
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Strange choices for MSDN … Pi+Mono & Node.js on Azure.
Agree :wall:
Not strange at all…if what you’re trying to do is get folks who are ALREADY using RPi to look at Azure as a means of cloud-enabling their devices.
RPi is a very popular platform. As much as some of us might wish for NETMF to be as popular, it simply isn’t, and beyond that NETMF covers a different part of the problem space than does RPi.
So if you’re a technical evangelist for Microsoft, with a commitment to increase the use of Azure services, do you come up with a completely MS-focused example that is preaching to the choir, but may not help you reach your goal, or do you target a broader community that may not use everything MS, but might be open to using Azure to connect their creations?
Don’t get me wrong…I’d love to see more NETMF stuff in MSDN Magazine (btw - one way for this to happen is for members of this community to submit article proposals: Special announcement about MSDN Magazine | Microsoft Learn), but I’m not at all surprised to see the [em]Azure Insider[/em] column try to entice RPi users to look at Azure.
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I understand them trying to bring more people to the MS platform as a whole (see HTML/CSS/JS for Win8).
They gave Python a passing mention in the article, which seemed to be just to acknowledge it presence and to minimize it. “Python is fairly slow and you can’t use it in scenarios where speed is crucial” → Couldn’t you say the same for Mono applications?
The Mono (which I like the concept very much and plan on testing with in near future) aspect seemed strange to me if you are focusing on the Pi people.
To me the technologies used seemed backwards – If you are trying to appeal to those folks, why not show Python & Pi with Node & Azure? Or if you want to use .NET somewhere (again, to me, not fitting with the audience if you’re trying to court the *nix/Pi people), then replace Node with C#/VB.
(I’m not trying to bash the article in anyway, just from my viewpoint it seemed like a strange mix of technologies)
@ mhectorgato - IMO (not knowing the minds of the authors), Mono can be a nice way to get non-Windows users (for example RPi folks who are on Linux) introduced to C# as a language. In theory, once someone gets comfortable with the language, perhaps they’d be more open to using it on its native platform, Windows, and with its native environment, Visual Studio.
Not saying that’s the reasoning, but that’s one possibility.
Can’t agree more. Microsoft’s IoT strategy is [em]AZURE[/em]. Microsoft’s IoT strategy is not NETMF and it’s not Gadgeteer.
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I think that overstates things slightly. Azure is arguably the centerpiece at the moment. But I think part of that is because they have not yet gotten NETMF strategy back up to speed. NETMF was plainly back-burnered, and I think there’s a recognition that that was a mistake. But as with any other strategic mistake by a large company, it takes time to rectify.
I certainly hope that over the next year, we’ll see some more significant attention paid to NETMF. Could be wrong, but that’s my hope.
BTW - don’t assume that what Technical Evangelists are writing or presenting on is what Microsoft as a whole is focused on. The two are often related, but not always in perfect alignment. 
Well, we all [em]hope[/em] that. We keep hearing it’ll happen, and it keeps not happening.