Yes, a hardware listing would be good, and I have no doubt that this is going to happen sooner or later.
What I am less certain about, is whether there will be a similar listing for Microsoft Partners who have shown competence with, and contributed to, NETMF. So that an industrial user who is interested in using the platform immediately finds suitable project partners in his country when he looks at the www.netmf.com site.
What I meant with my post #14 in this thread: such a prospective commercial user will not yet feel particularly welcome with www.netmf.com as it currently is. This is why I am so interested in learning whether there really [em]is[/em] an enterprise story to NETMF.
You briefly said āof courseā and then continued to shift the focus back to makers again, which is slightly unsettling to me. Of course makers are new for Microsoft, but fortunately ever professional engineer worth his salt is also a maker at heart (even if he may not have the time for really making much stuff), so āmakersā and āprofessionalsā are not mutually exclusive. There are quite a few industrial users of NETMF active or lurking on this forum!
So I think there is no reason why the Web site could not also get a section and a nice-looking icon for commercial users of the platform, where the benefits to them are explained. Not the least of which is that theycan use the same developers, know-how, programming language, tools, and to some degree APIs for everything from the cloud down to single-chip microcontrollers. There are precious few platforms that can claim such a feat. And I know from several companies where decision makers consider this [em]the[/em] key factor for being interested in the platform at all.
By ālisting hardwareā I meant as a category on the site. Iām not sure the site will have a list of all third-party hardware available. Thatās an idea, though, but someone would need to commit to maintaining it. Seems like a good spot for a wiki.
I shift focus to makers because thatās the crowd I deal with more than any other. Thereās more than enough focus on enterprise in the IoT group and in Microsoft in general.
I wouldnāt parse and analyze everything I say here, because then it gets difficult for me to comment on anything. If thereās a specific focus or non-focus, Iāll call it out. If you ask a question, Iāll do my best to answer it.
Business is in the framing memos for IoT just like makers/enthusiasts/education are.
Thanks. Thatās one of the things we discussed (pro and hobby magazines).
Which pro journals do you consider most popular/influential (Iām sure there are others in the IoT group who know this answer, but I donāt. I get things like Elektor, CircuitCellar, etc).
In fact a small article (half or quarter page) about Gadgeteer and the 1st board supporting it - the GHI Spider - in the German cāt magazine from heise brought me to NETMF (and GHI of course).
But ever since they mainly reported about Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ā¦
As for other Web sites, I regularly look at articles on www.embedded.com, in German at www.elektroniknet.de and www.computer-automation.de. The latter all belong to WEKA FACHMEDIEN GmbH, with the (paper) journals āMarkt&Technikā, āElektronik", āDESIGN&ELEKTRONIK", āComputer&AUTOMATION", āfunkschauā and some others, less interesting to me.
RTC Magazine would also be a relevant English publication, although it usually discusses high-end embedded microprocessors, only rarely the microcontroller space.
Iām probably not very well qualified to offer useful suggestions but what the heck. If the goal is to generate an active, open source community than measuring what the community generates that moves NETMF forward might be interesting. For example, I just pulled down some incredibly useful code that @ Architect posted on Codeshare. If Codeshare(or where ever) was growing by 10 posts a day (or a 100 a day) that seems like a clear indication the community is active.
A much more ambitious metric would be the number of NETMF environments available. Obviously GHI make a complete NETMF ecosystem available for the boards they sell. Secret Labs does the same thing. Iām sure you guys know ST micro makes NETMF avaialbe for a few of their eval boards in a pretty low key way (Development boards from partners - STMicroelectronics which Iām pretty sure came from Cuno and his team). However, I wouldnāt call the ST offering an ecosystem as I define it (my definition for ecosystem = a broad range of hardware, a great software development environment, vendor support, decent documentation, lots of software examples, community forum(s), etc). And that is about it for places you can find hardware with NETMF as far as I know. When you buy a dirt cheap evaluation board from TI, Atmel, Freescale, Silicon labs, and any of a dozen other MCU vendors, you usually get an evaluation version of IAR, Keil, Atollic, Altium and other IDEs). Seems like you could make a pretty compelling case to management if NETMF started showing up on the list of IDEs you get by default from companies like these.
Out of curiosity, has anyone here submitted a NETMF project to a magazine and had it rejected? Iām looking to see if there is a shortage of folks writing articles, or a lack of interest from the magazines.
For example, nuts & volts constantly puts in snarky/obnoxious comments in their ānew productsā section. Whoever writes that loves to mention exactly how much money was lost in Surface sales in pretty much every new product announcement.
So itās possible some magazines have said ānoā. I havenāt checked.
My experience with my publisher was very positive.
He made an issue with embedded topics.
I can not not talk about other publishers. My publisher has its focus on .Net and tries to look at all areas of .Net. Including the .Net Microframework.
