NETMF 4.2 – Porting Kit Studio

Version 4.2 went to Beta a few days ago with an impressive assortment of contributions from the community.  One contribution stands out for its scope and ambition.  That contribution is the PKStudio contributed by Alexandr Surkov and Igor Kiselev.

As anyone who has tried the NETMF Porting Kit, it is not for the faint of heart.  It was built for us to use and we have not gotten back to polishing it up.  Alexandr and Igor have tackled that problem by analyzing the porting kit and building an IDE for it!  Very Impressive.  Features are displayed in a tree structure and you can then build the solution as an aggregate of features.  Below you can see both the solution explorer and the feature explorer. 

Inside that structure, you have access to the source files for editing, you can compile the projects, track down compile errors, etc.

Here you can see the references in a graph so that you know what components are required to support specific functionality. Below, you can see the both the managed and native dependencies of Tinycore and you can see that there is a dependency on the Battery and Charger API that you might not have guessed. You can now stub that out if your application does not need it.   Another thing that you can see in this view is the dependency on the battery measurement feature for which you may have several drivers.  PK Studio gives you an easy way to associate the right driver for this implementation and package it all up in an image. 

PK Studio can generate make files that are compatible with µVision, the IDE for the Keil MDK tool chain.  Currently the make files support the 3.80a version of the MDK. PK Studio will generate one project for each of the native images of a Micro Framework solution, eg. TinyCLR, TinyBooter, NativeSample,… Below you can see the µVision IDE loading the make files for the TinyCLR project generated with PK Studio .

There is also the Component Analysis that is an analog of the Visual Studio Code Analyzer.  It checks the references, GUIDs, names, and other parts of the components

Finally, there are additional feature coming for the RTM release.  These include an interface to manage you project.

Great work guys – thanks for the contribution to NETMF and all your efforts. 

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