Embedded, its not part of foreplay, but it is still very important.

I still hate the classification of anything that describes itself as enterprise (and I work for a company slogans are sprinkled with enterprise).

Yesterday someone emailed me:

It was not the point of your blog today but I'd be interested in hearing about company's usage of Mono in embedded systems. Because of our affinity for C#/.NET we originally looked at WinCE for the next generation of one of our product platforms. It didn't go very well (we were still at WinCE 5 so I can't say how 6 is). Ironically, using Mono on a Linux Embedded system seems to give you more .NET / C# then you get with CF on WinCE.

So I reached out to a friend that has raved about Mono in the past, and I wanted to get a quotable answer from him (I asked him if I could quote one of his emails from last year). He did give me a quote that I can send around to folks, but his company will not publicly endorse his quote.

Which is exactly the problem that I was describing yesterday. Anyways, the quote is:

C# and mono is a great way to develop embedded products. If you separate the heavy lifting from the application logic properly, the performance impact of C# is not significant and makes application development much faster and less buggy.

I've been doing embedded development with C# for over 5 years and mono is way better than .NetCF due to superior performance and binary compatibility with MSFT's desktop .Net.

One thing that is particularly handy is that you can prototype on a desktop PC and just drop the managed binaries on the device and they just work - no need to recompile.

So anyways, you are going to have to trust me that I did not make up that quote myself.

And today we delivered a gift (or in Don Box parlance, a "small bouquet of flowers") for those embedded people that use ARM processors.

Update: The author of the quote comments:

When you mention embedded development with mono, it might be worth mentioning that there is some startup cost for the JIT, depending on the CPU speed and how much managed code there is, and that the memory footprint with mono will be larger than it would be without. For most devices this may not be an issue, but it is something a device developer should keep in mind. Hopefully the AOT support will mitigate the startup costs.