LOS ANGELES—At its Professional
Developers Conference here, Microsoft announced the release of Version 4.0
of the .NET Micro Framework and also that it
is open-sourcing the technology and making it available under the Apache 2.0
license.
In a blog post, Peter
Galli, Microsoft's senior open-source community manager, broke the news of
the release and open-sourcing of .NET Micro
Framework 4.0. Galli said the Apache 2.0 license was selected because it is
"already being used by the community within the embedded space."
The .NET Micro Framework is "a
development and execution environment for resource-constrained devices [that]
was initially developed inside the Microsoft Startup Business
Accelerator," Galli wrote. It later "moved to the Developer Division so
as to be more closely aligned with the overall direction of Microsoft
development efforts."
Galli noted, "Microsoft is also in the process of forming a community
of interested and involved members to help shape the future direction of the
product" as an open-source technology. "There will be a core
technology team that is composed of Microsoft and external partners, and people
will be encouraged to propose projects, which will be vetted before they are
accepted," he wrote.
Galli also wrote:
"The result of this [move to the
Developer Division] is that the .NET Micro
Framework has become a seamless development experience, bringing a single
programming model and tool chain for the breadth of developer solutions, all
the way from small intelligent devices to servers and the cloud. There are also
no more time-limited versions.
"Including the source code for
almost all of the product also ensures that developers now also get access to
the Base Class Libraries that were implemented for .NET Micro Framework and the CLR [Common
Language Runtime] code itself."
However, "the TCP/IP stack and
cryptography libraries are not included in the source code," Galli said.
According to Galli:
"Program Manager Colin Miller
told me this was because the TCP/IP
stack is third party software that Microsoft licenses from EBSNet, so we do not
have the rights to distribute that source code. If someone needs to access the
source code for the TCP/IP stack, they can contact EBSNet directly.
"As for the Cryptography
libraries, they are not included in source code because they are used outside
of the scope of the .NET Micro Framework. Customers who need to have
access to the code in the cryptography functions will find that these libraries
can be replaced, Miller said."
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