This thread is about a software driver for a chip called MCP23S17 that provides 16 additional digital IO pins to a micro controller such as the one on your Netduino.

The MCP23S17 gives you 16 digital input, output and interrupt enabled pins over SPI. Up to eight chips can be combined on a single SPI bus to provide a maximum of 128 pins.
Background
I was originally looking to make a dual ] board (Arduino shield form factor) for this driver to be used with. As so often however, I haven't found the time to complete the board so I decided to release the driver code for others to use.
About the software
The driver class is actually quite powerful and has a lot of features. The whole interface somewhat mimics that of native Netduino GPIOs in how they are created and used. Full source code is attached to this post.
You can create individual pins (input, output, interrupt) and also buses to represent a collection of pins in parallell.
The buses are very powerful - for example, you can easily create a 4 pin bus to be used in controlling an LCD or something like that.
You can also read and write pins or buses in a so called "burst mode" - this will result in bit streams in either direction at about a tenth of the configured SPI speed.
The driver can also be used in a special "direct mode" where all the built-in code for thread safe pin management etc is bypassed in favor of more speed.
How to use it
Simply download the attached code file and add it to your project and start coding with it - these lines of code the only ones needed for an output port:
// create driver to use SPI bus #1 and Netduino pin 17 for chip selectvar chip = new MCP23S17(var io = new MCP23S17(SPI.SPI_module.SPI1, Pins.GPIO_PIN_17);// create a port for pin 1var outport = chip.CreateOutputPort(MCP23S17.Pins.GPIO_1);// drive pin 1 highoutport.Value = true;There are more examples abailable in posts ahead. There's currently no separate documentation for the software but it's easy to adopt and there are lots of intelli-comments in the code to help guide you through.
I'd love for you guys to try it out and then hear about your experiences!
Hardware
Obviously, you need one or more MCP23S17 chips as well. The chip is available in a breadboard friendly DIP28 package and breakout boards are available on eBay and other places.
You wire the chip just as you would any other SPI slave device - connect power, ground, miso, mosi, clock, chip select and optionally an additional pin to receive interrupts.
NOTE: This driver is for the SPI version of the chip, i.e. MCP23S17 and not the regular MCP23017 which uses I2C. I was planning on isolating the transport layer to support both but I will probably never get around doing that so if you're up for it...feel free!
Code revision history:
v1.1 - corrected a bug involved in cascading
v1.2 - added internal multi SPI mgr
V1.3 - made a few insignificant clean ups
v1.4 - corrected a nasty bug in the multi SPI mgr
