I recently created a entry for the Spark Competition, go check it out and rate it highly. There’s 188 entries and the top 50 win a VIA Artigo Pico-ITX system which I’ve been excited to see since it’s release. I wrote a blog entry about it back in December.
The Spark Competition is for Microsoft's new embedded development environment focused on the new .Net Micro framework.
Microsoft's new framework is for lower-end microprocessors. While it is a Microsoft product it has some very interesting features like higher-level access to networking, interface, and data libraries. There are already some other competitors in this market, like the Linux based gumstix.
The .NET Micro Framework brings a rich, managed-code environment to smaller, less expensive, and more resource-constrained devices. Requiring only a few hundred kilobytes of RAM and an inexpensive processor, the .NET Micro Framework was built from the ground up to let you build applications using familiar Visual Studio development tools.
The ARTiGO Pico-ITX is probably over powered for the mid-range embedded market, I’ve seen some cool things made with the .net micro framework on much more modest hardware, it does not require windows CE.
In this video someone uses a USB(!) joystick to control a robot arm, he states the code only took a couple hours to write with the Micro environment.
I don’t think the Micro environment is a perfect fit for all embedded projects, and I haven’t been able to find the licensing cost, but I doubt it’s free. On the other hand it does provide a lot of easy higher level libraries that are sure to cut down on development time.
I’m interested in the platform purely because I already know the .net framework and I find it a good tool for rapid development of programs. My PSCombine program is written in vb.net 2.0.