I haven’t had this much fun programming in a long, long time – since the exhilaration of  the first project after college.

The further in time we go, the more removed the programmers are from the hardware. Consider the number of abstractions, that a typical C# corporate developer works through.

  1. CPU/Registers
  2. Windows Kernel
  3. Windows Drivers
  4. Windows API
  5. .NET Wrapper for Windows API
  6. Probably some other home grown or 3rd party framework
  7. Finally code.

That’s a lot of layers. If you think of a guy who writes firmware in assembly as a heart surgeon, then the C# coders are psychologists, trying to cajole and persuade Windows into doing what we need it to do.

That’s why, after perusing chapter 5 of Jens’ book and writing the following: 

   1:  OutputPort op = new OutputPort(Cpu.Pin.GPIO_Pin0, true);
 

and an LED light connected to the first pin of the CPU board lit up…well, I felt like a heart surgeon again.

The thing about this book…it’s so massively timely. .NET Micro Framework is not widely used, certainly not on the scale of the full blown .NET framework. There isn’t a whole lot of resources you can tap. Aside from a NNTP newsgroup and a forum or two, that’s it. There isn’t an army of programmers writing blog entries about it daily.

On top of all that, the book is actually pretty great and reads very easily. It goes from getting started to basic to advanced, giving you runnable code all along the way. It covers pretty everything that is possible today with the .NET Micro Framework.

It has an awesome mega chapter on networking, where he goes into having the device be a client or a web server, device discovery, SSL and all other kinds of goodies. In fact, I am trying to implement most of it and the book came in just in time.

Totally recommend it.  Link.