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I saw a news article today from about a month ago, saying that Microsoft had decided to release the .NET Micro Framework SDK and porting kit for free (it's avai

I saw a news article today from about a month ago, saying that Microsoft had decided to release the .NET Micro Framework SDK and porting kit for free (it's available for download now, I checked). I've been wondering for a while why people don't use it (or something similar) to write device drivers; it seems to me like that would go a long way towards making a system rock-solid. Also, one good thing about a properly written, all-managed system is security. Assuming that the underlying OS is bug-free (a huge assumption, I know), would there be any way to exploit such a system remotely? One other cool feature I thought of would be to implement some base classes for things like images, sounds, and movies, then implement various codecs and file formats using formatters and such in the System.Runtime.Serialization namespace. Thus, it'd be pretty easy to add support for a new codec or file format, since the codec class' assembly could just be copied to a special directory, then loaded via reflection. A final note...think about how awesome it would be to have a full-featured, well-written managed OS. Since everything on top of it is also managed, it'd be very easy to port it to another platform (all you need to do is port the very fundamentals of the OS, and the CLR takes care of the rest!)

daeken 17y ago
Managed code ensures things like buffer overflows are a thing of the past, so long as your compiler is secure. It doesn't prevent against the design flaws that often lead to security breaches, but it's a start. I'll take securing a compiler and design over securing hundreds of millions of lines of code, though, any day of the week. Edit: As for codecs and such, this is why I like my object store idea. Your codec class would encode to a bitstream like now, but the entire class would be there on disk. You could send the whole object across the wire and so long as they are using the same ICodec (or whatever) interface, it Just Works (TM).

daeken 17y ago

Managed code ensures things like buffer overflows are a thing of the past, so long as your compiler is secure. It doesn't prevent against the design flaws that often lead to security breaches, but it's a start. I'll take securing a compiler and design over securing hundreds of millions of lines of code, though, any day of the week. Edit: As for codecs and such, this is why I like my object store idea. Your codec class would encode to a bitstream like now, but the entire class would be there on disk. You could send the whole object across the wire and so long as they are using the same ICodec (or whatever) interface, it Just Works (TM).