We are glad to announce today the RTM of the .NET Micro Framework version 4.2.  You can download the SDK and PK as well as the all sources from our Codeplex project, client_v4_2 branch, at change number 13620.   (We will be distributing 4.2 solely through the Codeplex site this time and not on downloads.microsoft.com)

Version 4.2 of the .NET Micro Framework Porting Kit provides the following new features:

  • Remote Firmware Update: The .NET Micro Framework SDK and PK now support updating your device firmware remotely.
  • Complete Cryptographic Object Model over PCKS #11: Most types and algorithms used in the desktop framework are now supported. PKCS #11 allows extensibility at the firmware level for adding new cryptographic tokens.
  • 1-Wire, PWM and A/D object model: Support for PWM and A/D operations is now provided as a standard interface. 1-Wire is provided through a community development effort
  • SNTP and FTP (client and server): Support for SNTP and FTP is provided as a community development effort.
  • StringBuilder and Regex types: Support for StringBuilder and Regex is provided as a community development effort.
  • Transcendental functions for doubles in System.Math
  • VB.NET: The SDK now support VB.NET.
  • Support for Cortex M3 devices with STM32 processor family samples: The support for the STM32 family is provided as a community development effort and features two solutions for two different development boards. See the Porting Kit for details.
  • PKStudio: PKStudio supplements SolutionWizard to create solutions for the Porting Kit environment. See the Porting Kit distribution for details. (PKStudio code can be in the community branch under %SPOCLIENT%\CLR\Tools\PlatformDesigner\PKStudio and the binaries are instead in the %SPOCLIENT%\Tools\bin\PKStudio directory ready to use)

Minor improvements include

- DPWS performance improvements, especially for the event dispatching

- Broadcast and static DNS addresses support with DHCP for lwIP TCP/IP stack

- Improvements to the time service for lwIP and RTIP TCP/IP stacks

- IL code optimizations

You can find white papers about crypto, firmware updates, and the Codeplex distribution in general on the documentation page of the project.  You can find the general documentation on MSDN. PK documentation is in the distribution, under the documentation directory (you will find there also the full .chm help

With this release we had outstanding community contributions.  We would like to thank our Core Tech Team and all of our community.  In particular, the following contributions deserve a special note:

  • PKStudio, as a replacement for SolutionWizard, was contributed by Alexandr Surkov and Igor Kiselev. 
  • StringBuilder and Regex are contributed by Julius Friedman.  Thanks also to Michael Schwarz for helping with this effort. (Regex from Julius to follow shortly with a Beta update).
  • 1-Wire and Transcendental functions were contributed by Richard Scott.
  • The  SNTP driver is based on a managed code implementation by Valer Bocan.
  • The STM32 (Cortex M3) Port was provided by Cuno Pfister and Beat Heeb at Oberon Microsystems

We would like to thank you Alexandr, Igor, Julius, Richard. Cuno, Beat, and Valer for helping us make this a broader than expected release and contributing such important components.

As always we are looking forward to your feedback.  Please contact us through the Codeplex issue tracker.