Taking my own advice I decided to purchase a couple of Raspberry Pi to NRF24L01 shields from Ceech a vendor on Tindie.

The nRF24L01 libraries for my .Net Micro framework and WIndows 10 IoT Core devices use an interrupt driver approach rather than polling status registers to see what is going on.

Like most Raspberry PI shields intended to be used with a *nix based operating system the interrupt pin was not connected to a General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pin.

My first step was to add a jumper wire from the pin 8 on the nRF24L01 to GPIO pin 17 on Raspberry PI connector.

I then downloaded the techfooninja Radios.RF24 library for Windows IoT core and update the configuration to suit my modifcations. In the TestApp the modifications were limited to changing the interrupt pin from GPI 4 to GPO 17

private const byte IRQ_PIN = 4;

private const byte IRQ_PIN = 17;

I used a socket for the nRF24L01 device so I can trial different devices, for a production system I would solder the device to the shield to improve reliability.

I then ran the my test application software in a stress test rig overnight to check for any reliability issues. The 5 x netduino devices were sending messages every 500mSec