It all started at Microsoft's European Mobile and Embedded Developers Conference (MEDC Europe) 2006 in Nice, France. At this event, I saw the .NET Micro Framework presented for the first time in a session by Jonathan Kagle and Lorenzo Tessiore. As a .NET programmer for desktop and smart device applications, I was impressed by the idea of being able to program embedded microcontrollers with my everyday development tool and programming language: Microsoft Visual Studio and C#. I got a CD with the not-yet-released .NET Micro Framework SDK 1.0 from Lorenzo after the presentation; the emulator it...