My netcpu board arrived today. A nice FedEx man dropped it off this afternoon. I've spent the evening playing with it and it is lovely. For those of you who haven't heard about this little piece of magic, it is a board around the size of a postage stamp which runs C# code. For around the first time you can use Visual Studio and all the loveliness of debugging, viewing variables, single stepping and the like. On something you could put in a matchbox. And it works.

I had one scary bit when I ran a program which had an infinite loop in it. The way that the system works it runs the program when the power comes on, and I had a few nervous moments working out how to get control of a program which had no exit condition. But by judicious use of the reset button you can get control and download another program.

I've written a silly program just to make the led glow on and off (flashing is so passe). It uses multiple threads to implement mark-space modulation. You can find it on the community forum here: http://www.dotnetcpu.com/community.aspx

Next I'm going to connect some buttons and lights and write some silly games and stuff. I've always liked writing embedded code but I've always suffered because of the horrible development environment. I think that this could change all that. And also provide a chip with a fair amount of power to do some really interesting things.