MS announces open source .NET Micro Framework 4.0

BANGALORE, INDIA:Microsoft on Monday at the Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, announced that it has released the 4.0 version of .NET Micro Framework as well as open sourced it and made it available under the Apache 2.0 license.

While making this announcement, Peter Galli, open source community manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group wrote in his blog, “ The .NET Micro Framework,a development and execution environment for resource-constrained devices, was initially developed inside the Microsoft Startup Business Accelerator, but recently moved to the Developer Division so as to be more closely aligned with the overall direction of Microsoft development efforts.”

“The result of this 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,” he added.

The new .NET framework features include, HTTP and HTTPs, support for Multi-touch, Versioning,  Emulator support for SSL and HTTPS, Native XML Parser etc.

This version also includes source code for most of its components under the Apache 2.0 license, excluding the TCP/IP stack and Cryptography libraries.

“We do not include the source code for these libraries for several reasons – the TCP/IP stack is licensed from EBSNet and the Crypto libraries are used in other products besides the .NET Micro Framework.,” said another blog post by Colin at their MSDN website.

Microsoft also intends to start a community of interested and involved members to help shape the future direction of the product as an open-source technology. The community would have a codebase, which could be shared by the Microsoft and external developers from which they will release versions.

Galli's blog further added that there will be a core technology team that is composed of Microsoft and external developers, and people will be encouraged to propose projects, which will be vetted before they are accepted. The site will also support people building extensions that exist alongside the platform rather than being integrated into it.