I’m at the MVP Global Summit in Bellevue, WA, sitting in the Gadgeteer/NETMF lab. This is something I proposed this year and happily has turned out to be a hit with attendees.
It has turned out to be more popular than I could have expected. There are three lab sessions in a row, each with great turnout with lots of folks geeking out. The first session was standing room only.
Tons of people making their first digital cameras and more. Lots of love for NETMF 4.2 being 40% community contributed, OSS as well.
[Gus: Many of the overseas attendees have said they want to get the Gadgeteer over in Europe, but import duties are too high. They’ve asked for local distribution (Italy, Germany, Bulgaria etc.) as otherwise you can’t compete with Arduino and even Android tablets.]
From my own experience, I know event coordinators hesitate to allow NETMF sessions at their events, as it doesn’t seem “serious” (I submit to every event I speak at). Be sure to ask for NETMF/Gadgeteer sessions at your code camps, TechEd, regional events and more.
Oh, and I just saw the Cerebus announcement. Awesome!
Nice to hear the MS uber-geeks are taking a shine to this platform! Coincidentally, at lunch today I was reading the March MSDN mag article “Building the Internet of Things”. I was surprised at the articles projections of where this technology is predicted to go. 7 devices for every human on the planet? Wow! Maybe you can point the next skeptical event coordinator to this link Microsoft StreamInsight - Building the Internet of Things | Microsoft Learn . This is serious stuff!
[italic]“The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades”[/italic]
I was at the morning session with some follow MVP’s I’d had talked to about Gadgeteer, and they were very impressed at how fast and easy it was to work with Gadgeteer and I know they left with a fez wearing monkey on their backs and kits will be ordered.
The release of Cerberus couldn’t have been better timed as one chap at the morning session was an Arduino developer and with the release of Cerberus and how easy Gadgeteer is to work with he is reconsidering using Ardunio for his next project.
It was good to meet Pete, but I missed meeting devhammer as I had some other sessions to attending in the morning, but I did meet some other members of this forum at the MVP conference so I know we have some rather accomplished developers here.
Pete the MVP Summit needs more of these hands on session to introduce MVPs to some of the new or lessor known technologies. Gadgeteer is the perfect technology for a hands on session and I hope has proven to Microsoft that hands on sessions belong in future Summit Meetings.
@ Pete
Th UK resellers are pretty good, if a little slow to stock up at times. I have had great service out of http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk and http://proto-pic.co.uk. i think mouser have an EU arm as well but their site is a pain to navigate through.
Tulsa School of Dev 2012 is scheduling to have a full track on the .NET Micro Framework. I’ll be presenting at least one of those sessions. The http://schoolofdev.com/Tulsa/default.aspx website has not been updated for the 2012 sessions at this time. So keep a watch out for updates to their website soon.
It was great to play around with the Gadgeteer at the MVP Summit. I also made some fellow MVP jealous when I show up some code and project you can easily make with it. This is one of the rare session where you have a real hands-on
Definitely need more exposure for this kind of event.
