Welcome to .NET nanoFramework!
Here you’ll find all the tools, examples, documentation and a great developer ecosystem to help you on your next embedded systems project.
Making it easy to write C# code for embedded systems.
Welcome to .NET nanoFramework!
Here you’ll find all the tools, examples, documentation and a great developer ecosystem to help you on your next embedded systems project.
.NET nanoFramework is a free and open-source platform that enables the writing of managed code applications for constrained embedded devices. It is suitable for many types of projects including IoT sensors, wearables, academic proof of concept, robotics, hobbyist/makers creations or even complex industrial equipment. It makes the development for such platforms easier, faster and less costly by giving embedded developers access to modern technologies and tools used by desktop application developers.
Developers can harness the powerful and familiar Microsoft Visual Studio IDE and their .NET C# knowledge to quickly write code without having to worry about the low-level hardware intricacies of a microcontroller. Desktop .NET developers will feel “at home” and are able to use their skills in embedded systems development, enlarging the pool of qualified embedded developers.
It includes a reduced version of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) and features a subset of the .NET base class libraries along with the most common APIs included in .NET IoT allowing code reuse from .NET IoT applications, thousands of code examples and open source projects.
Using Microsoft Visual Studio, a developer can deploy and debug the code directly on real hardware.
The project is supported by the .NET Foundation. | ![]() |
You can watch this video from the Microsoft IoT Show featuring .NET nanoFramework connected to Azure IoT Hub, measuring a BMP280 sensors and using the unique deep sleep feature from microcontrollers. A real life example with .NET nanoFramework:
.NET nanoFramework is the perfect enabler for developing software that works on embedded devices. Start with a low cost and readily available development board, then use nanoFramework to write, debug and deploy your code.
Whether this is your first foray into programming or you are a seasoned developer, if you want a powerful and easy to use tool for developing software that runs on embedded devices, you are in the right place. With its modular architecture, it’s easy to grab the core components (like the CLR, debugger and interpreter) and extend it to new hardware platforms, .NET nanoFramework is the perfect partner for your project. The current reference implementations uses ChibiOS supporting several ST Microelectronics development boards, Espressif ESP32, Texas Instruments CC3220 Launchpad, CC1352 Launchpad and NXP MIMXRT1060-EVK.
Because it’s completely free and Open Source you have access to and the ability to modify all parts of the code including the ability to leverage what others have already contributed. If you are willing to, you can help shape the future by contributing back to the project and rapidly growing community.
Here are some of its unique features:
Here are some advantages over other similar systems:
There are several resources available to get you started:
You can help .NET nanoFramework to thrive through contributions, donations and sponsorship. Donations allow us to pay for things like infrastructure costs, PR effort, supports coding enhancements, adding new features, improving documentation and building learning material.
For more detail on this, please check our documentation on how to contribute.
Sponsors will get their logo and link to a website on our GitHub readme and our home page.
Backers are individuals who contribute with money to help support .NET nanoFramework. Every little bit helps and we appreciate all contributions, even the smallest ones.
There are other people and organizations that have contributed to .NET nanoFramework along the time in several ways: sponsoring the coding of a feature that was missing or needed improvement, paying for an expense, coding a feature or… We would like to acknowledge these sponsors.