(Click here for a larger view of a watch using Microsoft's .NET Micro Framework)
Microsoft watcher Mary-Jo Foley, for example, writes that Redmond's .NET MF team has been impacted by job cuts, and the employees that remain will shift to the broader NET Framework team. In response, she says, the royalties that had been associated with .NET MF will be eliminated, and the product's source code will be opened to the community.

A spokesperson quoted by Foley and by CNET said Microsoft will now make its .NET MF porting kit -- previously $600 -- available at no cost. "They will continue to support existing customers according to any agreements that they have in place with them, and will honor their lifecycle support pledge. Forums continue to be available at MSDN. After moving to the community model, new customers will be supported by the community," the spokesperson is said to have added.

The .NET Micro Framework

First released back in 2006, .NET MF is Microsoft's development environment for small, deeply embedded devices with constrained processor and memory resources. It originally grew out of the company's SPOT (smart personal objects technology) initiative, which brought about SPOT watches like the one pictured at the top of our story, as well as weather stations from Oregon Scientific and a coffee maker from Melitta.

Said to require a RAM footprint of as little as 64K, .NET MF can run on an operating system or directly "on the metal" without one. Only one application can run at a time, but it can include multiple threads, according to the company.

In October of last year, Microsoft unveiled Net Micro Framework 3.0, giving the environment a new file system, the ability to link to native code, touchscreen support, USB support, a WiFi infrastructure, and other enhancements. For further details of .NET MF 3.0, see our earlier coverage, here.

The environment's previous major update was in February 2008, when .NET MF 2.5 added both a native TCP/IP stack and support for Web Services on Devices (WSD), which aims to allow network-connected devices to discover and connect to one another without user intervention.

Some customers had already gained a file system, thanks to proprietary extensions created for .NET MF 2.5 by GHI Electronics. For its USBizi and Embedded Master modules, GHI devised an embedded FAT (file allocation table) implementation that is said to let the .NET MF-based devices access files on microSD- or USB-based storage. For more information, see our earlier coverage, here.

Further information

For further information about the .NET Micro Framework, see Microsoft's website, here. The .NET MF team's blog can be found here, with details of a recent Service Pack 1 release for .NET MF 3.0.

To see the blog posting by Mary-Jo Foley referenced above, visit the ZDNet website, here.

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