My Own Pirate Radio

In December 1999 I became employee #3 on a Microsoft team tasked with designing and delivering .NET Framework support for smart devices. I’d been part of strategy discussions on how we ought to support .NET in the space “below” PCs, so I was thrilled when the project got the green light. I signed up on the spot, little knowing what I was getting into. Much confusion and entertainment ensued.

The project was pretty much unscoped. Just which devices to support, for instance. What processors to target. Which application scenarios to focus on, and therefore, how much runtime platform functionality would be needed. Which operating systems to run on. And so on. A few niggling little details. We spent many months thrashing through all of this. Mike Zintel, our Development Manager at the time, writes about those early days here.

In the end we succeeded in building a platform - we called it the “.NET Compact Framework” - and shipped it on the Windows Mobile OS (nee Windows CE), which is the core OS that powers Windows Mobile Smartphone, Pocket PC, and a broad range of other devices. Our sister team helped us deliver comprehensive support for Visual Studio, so that developers could reuse their existing skills with little switching cost. We built in support for the x86, ARM, MIPS, and SH processor families, along with a surprisingly large amount of runtime functionality: enough to run what Mike fondly called “real apps”. And we got adoption, too: there are now hundreds of apps out there. I’m very proud to have been part of the effort.

Nowadays Mike manages the .NET Compact Framework team, doing a much better job of it than I ever did. And early this morning he posted something very interesting on his blog:

…working with the Xbox team has been among the most enjoyable and productive cross group work that I’ve done. I know that my team and the XNA team within Xbox, have been burning the midnight oil to allow us to demonstrate the feasibility of games written in managed code running on a .NET CLR on a final 360 dev kit. And I know that we’ve demonstrated the same game binary (almost the same; oh so close) running on the 360 kit, Windows and on Windows Mobile.

See Mike’s full blog post here, where he talks a little more about the rationale for pursuing a project like this, and hints at how it might add value to Xbox. The Xbox mention is near the end of the post. And see here where he describes support for an Avalon subset, WPF/e. .NET CF is not a toy platform.

This is a significant milestone. If Microsoft chooses to productize this it could open up a whole new wave of software for the Xbox, making the platform targetable by a much broader swath of application developers.

Mike’s post implies research is still underway, which means many technical and business decisions have yet to be made. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping the team gets to add another smart device - a really smart one - to their list.

Update March 16:

• A good roundup of commentary on ZBuffer
• Supportive words from Jason Zander, GM of Developer Frameworks
• Dan Fernandez, Lead Product Manager, Visual Studio Express is excited