I've been re-compiling my demo apps with the new FreeRTOS SDK. This is a lot easier to use for network access, if you are used to a BSD style socket interface (which I am).

So far, so good. One thing I've noticed is the lack of support for reading from the UART. I've written some code to handle the uart rx interrupt and read the received data. Seems to be working so far...

Updated code is in github https://github.com/mattcallow/esp8266-sdk