When I was at PDC, I saw the Phidgets folks in the Coding4Fun booth. Is it just me, or is this stuff dying to get merged with MSR’s Invisible Computing project? Haven’t heard of Invisible Computing? Here’s the description:

This site has the source code and documentation for Microsoft Invisible Computing. It is a research prototype for making small devices part of the seamless computing world. This site contains the source code and is available free of charge for research and educational use under the Microsoft Shared Source License.

Microsoft Invisible Computing consists of compact middleware for constructing embedded web services applications and a small component based Real-Time Operating System with TCP/IP networking to make middleware run straight on the metal on several embedded processors.

The goal is to make it easy to build custom smart devices and consumer electronics, especially battery operated; and to support research in invisible computing, operating systems, networking, ubiquitous computing, sensor nets, distributed systems, object-oriented design, and wireless communication.

FYI, I discovered the Invisible Computing project by searching the web for TinyCLR. TinyCLR is what powers the MSN Direct watch. From what I can tell (i.e. this is based on publicly discovered info) is that Invisible Computing is a shared source version of TinyCLR that works with a variety of hardware platforms. Sort of like a Rotor for embedded devices.

Check out a presentation and the code.

I’m feeling particularly geeky having just re-imaged my laptop’s dev partion. This is what’s running on it so far:

• WinFX Runtime – Sept CTP
• VS 2005 Team Suite Beta 2
• WinFX SDK – Sept CTP
• VS Extensions for WinFX Sept CTP
• VS Extensions for WinWF Sept CTP
• WinFS Beta 1
• DSL Toolkit Sept CTP (I hadn’t realized a new CTP shipped!)
• Guidance Automation Toolkit Tech Preview
• C# and VB LINQ Tech Previews

Not that this is of much use to anyone, but I thought it was cool. Not sure what I’m going to do with all this stuff yet, but I just had to have it all. I guess the stint in marketing didn’t completely wipe out my interest in coding.

FYI, I have to give major thumbs up to Terabyte Unlimited's BootIt NG product. My laptop runs three partitions: Production, Development and Documents. Putting all my docs on their own partition means I can pave the other two pretty much whenever I want. However, Windows XP wants to make the first partition it finds the C drive, even if you eventually choose to boot off another partition. This means I can’t create an image from on partition and restore it to the other. What a pain. But with BootIt NG, I can choose which partition to boot and hide whichever of the others I want to.

I still use VPC for a lot of my dev work, but for Avalon and/or device development – where VPC isn’t really practical – having a separate partition for dev work is really helpful.