The Moth

I hinted before that this would be one of the big announcements at MEDC 2006, and I wasn't far off.

At the high level, here is what I recall about it:

1. Evolution of the SPOT. Has tiny footprint (200-400 KB), about ~1MB of flash required and very low power consumption.

2. Ships with Watches, Microsoft TV, Vista SideShow and plans for many more internally and many partners already on board.

3. Targets platforms smaller than WinCE (and thus smaller than WinPX embedded, of course) such as Sensors, actuators, remote controls, wearable devices etc.

4. Bootable .NET runtime (i.e. this is not an application layer on top of the core platform... it *is* the platform) including managed drivers!

5. C# only, interpreted. Program via Visual Studio 2005, naturally :-)

6. ARM 7, ARM 9 only (no MMU).

7. 100-150 APIs is all an OEM/ODM needs to implement for supporting /porting/integrating the platform.

8. No Windows Forms, but if you include the UI/Shell, it is based on WPF - hope the NETCF team can take a leaf out of the NETMF book cause Avalon and XAML rock (I suspect I’ll be blogging about that more in the future)!

9. SumoBot competition at MEDC was based on this. I wrote some of our NETMF code for our bot (we lost in the first round... hmm...).