Microsoft released the .NET Micro Framework 2.0 the other day.  This is pretty cool technology with a lot of possibilities.  I find it hard to play around with it too much though because I don't really have any hardware that will let me deploy applications to it.  It would be neat if there was a way to write stuff that could run on my watch and load it up on there.

One really cool application that I've seen (in this video) is somebody setting the temp in their house via their cell phone while on their way home.  It would be sweet to set up that kind of automation and remote control, as far as lights and thermostat and other things in your house.  Leviton has a lot of home automation technology.  It looks like some of it is .NET Micro related too.  Haven't followed up any more as of yet to see how pricey or hackable the products are though.

Every year around this time I write a post talking about how much I like my watch.  Guess what?  I still like it.  I’m usually reminded of it this time of year because I have to decide if I want to pay the $50 to keep using the MSN Direct service.  I chose to renew it this year.  I’ll still read the news on it every now and then when I ride the bus to work.  I still use it to check football scores when my wife has drug me out shopping on a Saturday afternoon.  I don’t really use it too much for the IM features anymore.  But the one area where it is still indispensable is reminding me when I have a meeting.  That one feature (synching up with Outlook) is worth its weight in gold.

One of the things that first intrigued me about the technology was the hopes that I would be able to write code for it.  Unfortunately at the time when I got the watch you had to buy a development kit that included a chip to test your code on.  In the end I wasn’t interested enough to buy the development kit.

But now you can develop for the SPOT platform in Visual Studio using the .NET Micro Framework and SPOT emulator. It seems pretty cool when you first use it.  That is until you realize that there doesn’t seem to be a way to get that to an actual device.  Right now I can’t write some code that does something, and push that down to a device like a watch.  Plus, even if you could, there isn’t a whole lot of useful stuff that can be done without being able to access the radio spectrum and get some real-time communication.  One application that I can think of off the top of my head that doesn’t need the real time communication would be to load and have the ability to read certain bus schedules so that I don’t have to look online or have a paper copy handy.

Actually, I guess that bus thing would be more “useful” than “cool”.  You actually do have the ability to do something cool, and that something is called Sumobot.  The SDK comes with a Sumobot emulator and startup code.  You can even buy a Sumobot kit that you can build and push your code out to!  Another thing you can also do with the Sumobot is enter a Sumobot Contest.  I’ve already submitted mine.  Anybody else up for some Sumobot?