The evolution of technology and application needs leads to design complex systems both at hardware and software levels. Modeling approaches and automatic code generation are mature techniques in several application areas to shorten devel- opment times even in complex applications. This paper introduces the application of these techniques to critical embedded systems such as networked control systems (NCS). In particular, the case of an Internet-based control of a ball&plate system is presented. The first part of the paper is devoted to the plant modeling and control design strategy taking into account the distributed layout. The second part covers the automatic code generation process: from ScicosLab diagrams, C code is automatically generated onto multiple and physically distributed threads, with the automatic synthesis of thread scheduling, communication and access to the I/O primitives for sampling and actuation. The case study corroborates that model-based design tools mastering NCS complexity can contribute to the success of future industrial projects.