Build System Futures

Re-thinking the NETMF Build infrastructure

When thinking about the future work for the NETMF build system there is one overarching high level design goal, beyond the functional requirements: Don't re-invent the wheel, leverage existing solutions to the maximum extent possible

The currently build infrastructure is completely customized to NETMF with a long history of changes, making it difficult to understand and maintain. Furthermore the world around micro controllers has changed significantly from the days where NETMF was first designed. At the time NETMF was created there were no standards for low level SoC startup or driver APIs, every vendor had there own way of doing things, if they provided any libraries at all. Thus NETMF had to establish its own HAL API to help in abstracting out the lower level. Fast forward to today and we have a formally documented API model in CMSIS from ARM. While this is specific to ARM Cortex-M Micro controllers the vast majority of it can apply to other CPUs.

Re-usable software packs

Building applications from Software packages, whether it is Maven, Nuget, NPM, etc... the industry as a whole has found significant value in the use of packaging code and build metadata into a single downloadable versions package. In these systems the source code or binaries are bundled into a container (usually ZIP compressed with some sort of index/metadata to describe the contents). This allows an application to specify hard dependencies explicitly, including the exact version without worry that newer version could break the application. CMSIS-PACK follows in this line with specific support for the micro controller space. Of particular interest to the .NET Micro Framework is the declaration of APIs and Requirements.