Today the .NET Micro Framework team is releasing a beta update of the .NET Micro Framework SDK that adds support for Visual Studio 2013. The release also contains other improvements that will benefit developers and hardware partners, making the install and update experience better.

Check out the .NET Micro Framework Team blog, and the Netmf.com site to learn more about .NET Micro Framework and this release. Read the Microsoft Open Technologies blog to learn more about this open source project and community engagement.

You can download the .NET Micro Framework SDK 4.3.1 (SDK R2 Beta) update from our project site. Please try it out, provide feedback and start contributing to the open source project.

Supporting for Visual Studio 2013

The .NET Micro Framework SDK now supports Visual Studio 2013. That’s welcome news, since we’ve heard many requests for this support. In the process of integrating the SDK into Visual Studio 2013, we adopted a new architectural approach that decouples the .NET Framework SDK from Visual Studio. You can now use the Visual Studio version that works best for you, or multiple versions at once. .NET Micro Framework Visual Studio integration is delivered via a Visual Studio VSIX package, which is independent of a particular Visual Studio version.

The new approach also helps hardware partners. .NET Micro Framework hardware vendors can now support multiple Visual Studio versions with a given piece of hardware and firmware. That also streamlines the overall experience for app developers, too.

A first glimpse at the upcoming support for Visual Studio “14”

The .NET Micro Framework team is looking ahead and has already started to enable support for Visual Studio “14”. There still is more work to do to fully support Visual Studio “14” but you can already give it a try if you are an early adopter. Please let us know what you think.

.NET Micro Framework is Open Source

The .NET Micro Framework is an open source project from Microsoft, licensed as Apache 2. It is developed by Microsoft engineers assigned to Microsoft Open Technologies and by others in the maker community. Hardware makers are able to use the .NET Micro Framework code from the GitHub project without any additional license or paying any fee to Microsoft.

Next Steps

The .NET Micro Framework SDK 4.3.1. (R2 Beta) release brings key improvements and updates. The Visual Studio 2013 support has been a common request which the .NET Micro Framework team is glad to deliver. But the team doesn’t want to stop here and is already at work on many more updates and improvements. We want to hear about you experience with the new release, with the work in progress and what you would like to see coming. Drop the team a note, either commenting here, the .NET Micro Framework Team Blog or on the GitHub project.