.NET Micro Framework v3.0 Service pack 1 contents

The .NET Micro Framework team released the service pack 1 of the v3.0 release on 4/22/2009. The service pack follows the 3.0 release of October 2008 by six months and delivers a set of bug fixes in the porting kit of the .NET Micro Framework, both at the CLR level and at the level of the device drivers. The service pack 1 (SP1) is a package that can be installed on top of the 3.0 porting kit of the .NET Micro Framework. Since the SP1 is completely compatible with the SDK released with the 3.0 version in October 2008, the installation package does not include an SDK, the SDK of the RTM release should be used instead. The SP1 is available for download from the MSDN Web site and can be purchased from the usual distribution channels.

The SP1 contains both fixes for the device drivers shipped with the porting kit as sample ports as well as bugs fixes for the precompiled CLR libraries. No new functionalities were added or removed, which ensures the full compatibility of this release with the previous SDK. Most of the bugs of this release were found and addressed in collaboration with our porting partners. Other fixes constitutes improvements to the workflow of the porting activity, or to the sample ports and to the support for the native compilers, such as GCC.

The feature areas we addressed include the following:

· SD card and file system: we added support for dealing with device with a Master Boot Record and very large devices, which require a long formatting time. We also fixed a file system issue where open handles were not properly closed during a reboot of the runtime

· Serial interface: we fixed the support for parity and for discarding the outstanding bytes in the serial buffers.

· Power management:we improved the support for low power applications by extending the default sleeping time of the runtime to the very next wake up event of the managed application or to the next timer scheduled by a driver. Also the wake up time of the managed application is now visible to the drivers layer, which allows implementing more sophisticafed deep sleep strategies, e.g. using the RTC clock

· Extended Weak References: we fixed a bug for which EWRs were not persisted on a reboot of the runtime

The bug fixes related to the sample ports include:

· Improvements to the sample port for the LPC2294 processor for NXP and its development board PCM023 from Phytec. These improvements include fixing our boot loader functionalities and adding support for power management to the sample port.

· The sample port for the Atmel SAM9261 processor and its development board SAM9261-EK has been improved by fixing bugs in the SPI and USB drivers and fixing a minor issue related to the clock divisors. We improved the support for GCC for this platform and we devised a new booting strategy that allows our boot loader to execute form data flash and launch the CLR from NAND flash into RAM. This booting strategy is more suitable to a production device and will work out of the box for all ARM compilers supported in the porting kit, including GCC.

Please refer to the service pack release notes for further details. Please contact your hardware vendor or OEM for the details concerning the availability of these fixes on their platforms.

Lorenzo Tessiore

Development Manager