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I guess I stand corrected about there being a version of Windows that could run on a small microcontroller. :-[
If Microsoft’s future IoT OS has anything to do with Win 3.0 we are all doomed!
:wall:
News for shareholders only (ie lacks technical depth). Reality is Microsoft has clued in that IoT is going to play out at a pile of different levels and to get in on the full game you need to get in on the whole ecosystem. Yep Azure is going to make buckets of dough from IoT but only if there is a supporting ecosystem which includes from devices on up. .NetMF is that device level ‘Windows OS’, then they have various ‘levels’ of Windows from there on up.
Am I inspired, in a word yes, because someone at the top of Microsoft finally caught the vision that many here have always had and perhaps now they get it, so its party on time for .NetMF and Gadgeteer, but what a fight it has been to get here and we still have lots of work coming up to make the vision a reality.
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I was thinking about something much more simpler.
Well, than let’s buckle up and join to ride the bumpy road laying ahead of us …
There will be ups and some downs but at the end we were not only part of it, but helped make it a reality and hopefully it will be to the good of us all …
I’ve had a lot of executive briefings with partners lately.
As technologists, when we think of sensors, we often think of the actual sensor. When an executive at an oil company thinks of a sensor, they often think of the entire package that gets the data and sends it along.
In this way, we could be talking about particularly smart sensors, or even gateway devices that aggregate from many physical sensors. Especially in gateway devices, operating systems do help. One thing they really help with is the ability to scale up the device to more and more powerful hardware depending on load (from a small low-power embedded device all the way up to an embedded PC)
Shareholders and public aren’t going to understand that distinction, so it makes no sense to get to that level of detail with them any more than it would make sense to try to describe the differences between the various ARM processor architectures. It matters to us, but not to them.
Personally, I’m really excited about this. Through both NETMF and Windows, we’ll be able to cover a very large number of the scenarios while providing a single set of tools and a lot of commonality in API and programming models. That inspires me for sure. 
Aside: Next week, I’m doing a NETMF briefing with a very large partner who wants to know what we’re up to and how they will be able to apply that to their field devices. In three weeks, I’ll be in India doing a session that largely focuses on NETMF at TechEd India, plus a keynote to 1000-1500 students.
Pete
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@ Pete Brown - Sorry for this OT inside another OT … you are talking about techEd India in three weeks… are you attending european teched in Barcelona in two weeks?
Other folks from my team will be there, and I worked with Steve Teixeira to get an IoT session there for him. However, I am not planning to attend. I’ve been away from home more than at home over the past couple months, and so need to back off a bit.
Pete
My impression was that Windows 10 would merely support embedded devices by mediating their connection to the internet. Think of it as the Windows 10 based system being an IoT hub with a zigbee or z-wave radio to facilitate communication to the cloud.
That’s one possible (and likely) use. You can do pretty much whatever you want, though. It’s Windows.
Pete