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Microsoft Open Sources .NET Micro Framework
An anonymous reader writes "Back in July, Microsoft announced it was making .NET available under its Community Promise, which in theory allowed free software developers to use the technology without fear of patent lawsuits. Not surprisingly, many free software geeks were unconvinced by the promise (after all, what's a promise compared to an actual open licence?), but now Microsoft has taken things to the next level by releasing the .NET Micro Framework under the Apache 2.0 licence. Yes, you read that correctly: a sizeable chunk of .NET is about to go open source."
The entire concept behind .NET is that any company that bases their products on it slips the yoke of control onto their necks and lock the hasp. You don't code your applications to .NET and then move them to anything other that whatever versions of Windows Microsoft chooses. You can call it Open Source, but that doesn't make it so.
.NET micro is mostly for embedded devices running WinCE.
You sound Canadian eh, definitely not American and New Yorkers would eat you for breakfast with a smidgen left over for lunch.
Shh.
From the article:
Microsoft isn't opening up the whole stack: the TCP/IP parts are missing because another company wrote that code, and the cryptography libraries are missing because "they are used outside of the scope of the .NET Micro Framework"
Does anyone know how hard it is to write your own .Net classes/wrappers for the missing pieces? .Net references for CLR internals? I know how Java was designed and written, did Anders or Microsoft provide any references for .Net internals outside of the PR fluff pieces on MSDN? How about a decent book.
Are there any good
From a embedded Linux perspective, I find this way more interesting than Mono.
Thanks,
It's just the normal noises in here.
You can get practically no where with the free versions. They are EULA limited with what you can do. They also won't handle the plug-ins and those are what make VS a joy to work with. I wish eclipse were either more like the Mac IDE or more like VS but it's kind of half way between and not as good as either. I haven't tried Sharp develop but the integrated debugging in VS is really nice. Ive used the UNIX type debuggers and I can never remember enough of the arcane incantations to keep up with how they work. I really wish I could do rapid application development as good as I can in VS on any other system. Mac comes close but even it has it's short comings.
Why bother
Mm. Not really. Mono pushes their own libraries - which means you often can't take a mono executable and run it on a windows box without first installing mono libraries. Kind of an ironic twist, really...
Meh. Encapsulate them in a VMWare virtual machine instance like the Deki Wiki appliance. That's a mono app, I believe, running on some distro of Linux or other. I drop it on whatever machine is handy to run it. Dead easy.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The same way standard Visual Studio is. Ie. Can't write a competing product like a word processor. And the last time I looked they limited your commercial use as well.
Why bother