Firmware???

This is a meta-blog entry.

I’ve been rather silent the last few weeks. There’s a reason for that: a couple of months ago I became a “firmware guy.”

Firmware???

Flexibility. It’s a wonderful thing.

The last few weeks have been an intense learning period, and I didn’t want to bother my blog readers with the details of deriving clock speeds from oscillating crystals, or flash wait states, or the proper design of a bootloader that can flash its own upgrade without the danger of leaving the system in an unusable state. Yes, I’ve been doing all this (starting from an existing code base, thank goodness!).

I am still doing .NET development as well. However, all of the .NET work I’m doing is not groundbreaking or really interesting, so I haven’t been posting about it. It’s just boring stuff like extending Nito.Async.Sockets to support Silverlight and the Compact Framework. There’s only two interesting points in that project (which I’ll blog about when the time comes); it’s mostly just grunt work.

Now that my firmware learning curve is pretty much complete, I’ll be inserting firmware content into the blog as well. Naturally, there will still be some .NET content interspersed with the new firmware content. Almost every day now, I write both C and .NET code (and even assembly if I can’t avoid it).

Upcoming Stuff In My .NET World

I’ll be speaking at Day of .NET in Grand Rapids next week on TCP/IP socket protocols.

It looks like Nito.Async will get a release around the turn of the year. The last release (in September of 2009) has been very stable; I’ll just be spinning off Nito.Async.Sockets into a separate library, putting up some online documentation, and possibly adding Code Contracts.

I also have a special .NET-related surprise coming in February of 2011. More on that when the time comes. :)