First of all: using the ethernet connection with the FEZ Panda II works well if you follow the steps from GHIElectronic’s eBook “FEZ Internet of Things”. You just set up MAC, IP, netmask, gateway and DNS server settings and you are ready to go.
But, there is actually a drawback: although the FEZ Panda II uses the .NET Microframework 4.x (NETMF), it does not fully support the System.Net namespace due to resource limitations of the device!
This means that all code using System.Net from the NETMF will not work, giving you a System.NotSupportedException. One disadvantage of this is, that most 3rd party NETMF projects using networking will not work as well.
The workaround to this problem is to use the network classes provided by GHIElectronics. In detail, it helps to add the following references to your project:
GHIElectronics.NETMF.NetGHIElectronics.NETMF.W5100GHIElectronics.NETMF.W5100.Http
Those references provide all the classes used to successfully establish network connections via TCP or UDP. As said above, the examples in the eBook are very useful, so I’ll not go into detail here ;)
Now that I basically got the network connection working I’m going to think about some example usages and over the course of the next weeks I’ll share my observations (and maybe some code too) here.