Well, there's a statement

Why in the world would we want to tie the Windows brand to NETMF? What positive impact would that have?

NETMF already has enough of an uphill battle to acceptance, if we told people “it’s just really small Windows”, they wouldn’t even bother listening to the next sentence before dismissing it.

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NETMF is important, but quite separate. The NETMF runtime and interpreter run right on the hardware.

Windows is the full operating system. Any .NET code on this runs on the operating system. For example, to get access to lower-level stuff in Windows, you have to go through a stack of drivers. They may be highly optimized, but it’s not like mBed or NETMF where you’re basically accessing mcu functions directly.

Satya is talking about a single version of Windows, defined as the operating system with or without the UI stack (TBD) that runs across all those devices. The programming model is the Universal App Platform (UAP) which supports .NET, C++, and Javascript.

NETMF is targeted to even smaller devices with memory measured in KB instead of MB, and typically with a lower parts count and lower power consumption. Although there is overlap (just like there is with NETMF and CE and “big” Windows Embedded today), the different systems tend to sit in different strata in the IoT pyramid.

So NETMF is not “small Windows”. It’s more of an on-the-metal programming API with some OS-like constructs like threading. Could it get closer to the UAP? Quite possibly, but that would be a lot of work and might involve breaking existing code. Also, some of those abstractions just get in the way of Getting Stuff Done, which is what NETMF really excels at.

Pete

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