Netduino is an electronics platform. Using Netduino, hobbyists and programmers can create electronics projects (and electronics-based art projects) with ease. Several Netduino boards are available, which I explore in detail later in this chapter.

Netduino apps use the .NET Micro Framework. This programming framework from Microsoft is easy to get started with; for beginners, writing .NET code is as easy as creating simple JavaScript animations for a web page. And for the millions of programmers who already write .NET code, the .NET Micro Framework provides an incredibly powerful set of features (such as events, threading, and line-by-line debugging).

Traditional microcontroller code consists of a fixed loop where code checks conditions and performs actions based on those conditions. In contrast, the .NET Micro Framework empowers you to break your app’s tasks into simpler routines. You can execute those routines after a certain amount of time or in response to hardware actions. You can even multitask! These features let you build very sophisticated apps using easy-to-understand code.