Make the Switch

A good fail-safe option is to buy a commercial dev kit and avoid some of the really challenging work in device development. Click here for more information on available Kits, their features, peripherals support, processors etc, and where to buy them. With a dev kit and the SDK you have everything you need to go ahead and build that application on your planned hardware.

The simplest way to learn about .NET Micro Framework is to download our free SDK. Included is a free copy of Visual C# 2008 Express Edition. By using the powerful, easy-to-use simulator you can design your application and emulate how it would perform on your hardware without spending a penny.

If none of the available dev kits out there provides all the options and/or controls you need, then it is time to get our Porting Kit - available here. If you don’t meet the criteria for a credit card purchase send email to netmfbiz@microsoft.com. The Kit is very comprehensive, full of extensive details with lots of examples. And of course you can always get extra help by participating in our technical forums and asking questions.

With the Porting Kit you can build managed drivers and/or a Hardware Adaptation Layer (HAL) for your propriety board. To help you, the Porting kit offers sample HALs for NXP, Atmel, Freescale and Nuvoton processors among others, You will need some extra tools to make full use of the Kit. There are 3 options for ARM processors – arranged in order of greatest to least expense: ARM RVDS 3.1, Keil MDK, GCC 4.2.1. Note that Microsoft has found that the ARM and Keil toolchains produce smaller code size. For Blackfin processors you’ll need ADI’s VisualDSP++ 5.0.

Note, you can’t really build a commercial device at this point because the Porting Kit provides tools to build time-bombed runtime images. You get 720 hours of runtime – basically 2 years at 1 hour per day or one month at 24 hours per day. If you need more time you can easily re-flash.

The final step once you decide to get into production is to talk to us about a commercial distribution license. License fees are charged on a per unit basis but are relatively inexpensive with cost reduction incentives for higher volumes. Contact netmfbiz@microsoft.com for detailed information.