A Look at the .NET Micro Framework

The Discussion

• 

  The only piece of hardware that supports the micro framework AND wi-fi is $1,000. Yikes! Way out of my league.
  
  Why is it so expensive?
  

• 

  @minh - it's probably so expensive because its the only piece of hardware. If there were 100s of hardware devices that supported this then the price would be low. This is the cutting edge and early adoption costs!

• 

  Minh,
      There is some work in progress that will enable Wifi on some of the existing and less expensive development boards so stay tuned.  It is hard to get all this together at once for the launch but it is coming. 

• 

  Way to costly for me too.

• 

  I figure that the price has something to do w/ demand... I have found another board that does Wi-fi, but no .Net (BasicX I think) for $350. That's a huge difference.
  
  But I wonder how devices like the iPod Touch or Zune can have complete Wi-Fi functionality for $200, while a board on its own is almost double the cost.
  
  I guess, if you're building a device prototype, it doesn't really matter, but if you're in the enthusiasts market, it's cost prohibitive.
  

• 

  Micro framework is not for real world like you and me, just for MS research development inside MS world, the cost is not important to them. they need to show what they can do, not what is the cheaper ways.

  There are many good AVR HW and SW platform out there. like PIC, Ardunio ... etc, many many time better than Micro framework