1 reply to this topic

[James]

I'm trying to get a grip on the current state of NetBIOS with the Netduino Plus and where it's headed. I'm not well versed on the topic but here's what I can gather: NetBIOS traditionally provides 3 services, a name service, session service & datagram distribution service. The name services are most interesting to me since they would the Netduino Plus refer to other network devices based on their NetBIOS name rather than an IP, and also allow Netduino to supply a NetBIOS name that other devices could use as a reference to the Netduino. There also appear to be varying amounts of Netbios support available in both the .NET MF code supplied by Microsoft as well as the excellent MF Toolkit available at http://netmf.codeplex.com . From what I could tell by running Reflector again the Dll it looks like there's very little NetBIOS code in there - just 2 enums. Finally, user Pascal06 looks to be cooking up some great & practical NetBIOS support. This would appear to be the code that allows Netduino Plus to broadcast a NetBIOS name to other devices on the network so we don't have to refer to it by IP address. After poking around a couple of questions remain: 1. What NetBIOS support does MS provide in NET MF? I understand this is the level of support that Netduino Plus will ship with so it's good to see what we'll be able to do out of the box. 2. What if anything does the MF Toolkit add to the mix? 3. What does Pascal06's work add? 4. Finally, what are the future plans for adding to the base NetBIOS support that will ship with Netduino Plus? Thanks for the great work, the active Netduino community makes this a very enjoyable hardware platform!

[Chris Walker]

Hi James, Pascal is making some really incredible contributions. As long as there are no major RAM implications and we can integrate it in an open source fashion, we plan to add his NETBIOS contributions back into the core firmware... No dates or firm plans, but that's the general plan. [Big kudos to Pascal.] Chris