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On Microsoft's Embedded DevCon Keynote
An anonymous reader writes "WindowsForDevices reports on the keynote talk at Microsoft's Windows Embedded DevCon (developer conference) taking place this week in San Diego. The story includes some interesting comments and highlights from the talk. Don't miss the cool bit about the ARM7-based 'SPOT' development platform that runs a tiny version of the .NET Compact Framework -- Microsoft is demoing a robot that's run by SPOT. There's also a pointer to an online video demo of a project to create a digital picture frame using Win CE."
In my opinion Windows XP Embedded is the largest boondogle I've ever come across.
Is there a way to keep these boxes(cancer) secure?
"think of it as evolution in action"
I work for a company that does Point of Sale software and we looked at Windows CE. The company that built some of our hardware (I won't give their name, let's just say its Not Columbia Records) sent us a CE image and a little boot utility that copied the image into memory off the hard disk and kicked it off. It booted up okay, and reminded me of a really bad version of Windows 95. (Heck, Windows 95 is a bad version of Windows 95, but this was worse). Particularly amusing was that apparently it had been expected to be used with flash memory rather than a real hard disk, so copying files took a long time as there was no head movement optimization.
The disk goes Clcklklklklklklklklklklklklklk for about 3 minutes to copy the 6 MB image.
Also, if there were bad sectors on the drive, it would corrupt the root directory and you'd have to reformat the drive and start over. This was especially bad for us as most of the hard disks on our customer's systems are inches away from a cash drawer that flies open then gets slammed shut constantly.
Needless to say, the customer we were evaluating this for is still running MS-DOS.
Unknown host pong.
I don't have any WinCE experience(VXworks, custom schedulers, and Integrity mostly), but one of my coworkers, whose opinion I generally respect uses CE for all his moonlighting contract jobs and he calls it rocksolid, easy to use, etc. etc. He's got lots of embedded experience, mostly safety critical, and he considers it a truly useful tool.
I can't ignore it outright, because he really does know what he's doing, he's written his own schedulers and memory managers for projects for 8051s and whatnot, so he's not just saying "oh, this looks easy I'll use this". But I'm also hesitant to believe that M$ has made something reliable enough to run embedded hard real-time.
Anyone want to enlighten me further?
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Now all it needs is wireless capability and we can transmit photos from the PC in minutes!
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up... reading.-Henny Youngman
Could the jukebox in this picture possibly be the one on this site?
bundaegi is good for you
I always wondered why Gates thinks certain technologies and products are going to be big. Tablet PCs for example while is a great concept, it is severly limited by todays technology (Poor handwriting reconition, short battery life, etc). And yet, Gates has put his money down on it 3 times (Pen Services for DOS, Pen Services for Windows 95, Windows XP Tablet Edition). Compare him to Steve Jobs, who has had good sucess since he has returned to Apple (iPod, iTunes, iPod Mini, Airport Express/Extreme and iMac) Its probably just their philosophies.
Stupid binary clock written for CF.net. It was rather fun / simple to program simple stuff for it, I think it would be significantly less fun if one had to program a real app for it. The source code has a bunch of code for checking the status of power, etc, so you might find it helpful if you are designing an app like that.
Install cabs
Source
That said, my palm m105 was a lot more stable than my current pocket pc, which is a toshiba.
Toshiba pocket pc support sucks ass by the way, AVOID BUYING TOSHIBA PDAS AT ALL COSTS!!
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My company was looking some embedded hardware with some specific capabilities. It took a while, but last year the hardware arrived. Since I was the first user, I was offered the choice of WinCE or Linux. I personally prefer to develop under Linux, but in this case I thought it was best to go with whichever one the hardware manufacturer was most comfortable with, and that was CE.
They supplied prototype hardware. This was just the CPU manufacturers reference design, which they laid up and hand soldered. A contractor recommended by Microsoft then produced a "basic" CE image, and we were away. So far so good. The next step was design and delivery of produce production boards. These were just the reference design with unwanted bits removed, and the form factor adjusted accordingly. Again, they put a "basic" CE image on it, and it all worked.
The final step was to put the "real" CE image on the device. The major differences between this and the basic seemed to me to be be little details, like persisting the registry to flash, making the CF card work, making the buttons work, making USB work with 2.0 devices, making power off work and so on. The job went to the same Microsoft contractor, who promised delivery in a week or so.
That was in January. Lots of phone calls later, and me finally threating to cancel the deal forced them (the manufacturer) to take drastic steps: they made the contractor's staff work in their offices, so they could monitor the work being done and the progress being made.
That was two months ago. Meanwhile the situation was explained to Microsoft, but they insisted the if their nominated contractor couldn't get CE going nobody could.
More threats from me, and the manufacturer contacted another manufacturer in Germany who was using CE with the same reference design. They found who did their CE image, and ask them to do the same job. That was a month ago. Nobody has delivered. Nobody has raised any queries over the hardware design. And I, an embedded programmer by trade, and sitting here mystified by how hard it appears to be to get CE to go.
At the same time I have written my own apps to run on this thing. It is written in C# (which is what Microsoft recommended). I prefer Java as it runs well under Linux - but Microsoft does not supply a Java VM for CE - surprise, surprise! The back end of these apps (the server part) runs on Linux. So I had to make C# run under Linux. I choose PNet (as opposed to Mono) for reasons I won't discuss here.
The contrast between the two efforts could not be more stark. Microsoft CE.Net mostly worked from the start, although it wasn't obvious how to do some things and it did have one of two bugs. Moving beyond that point - figuring out how things work, and fixing the bugs ranged from very hard to impossible - for all the usual reasons. Microsoft's documentation was good, but when it fell short there is no backup - no source, no helpful online community, and no one willing to fix bugs. Granted I didn't go looking for someone looking to do these things for money.
PNet, in contrast, didn't work well when I first got it. It took me a day just to figure out how to make the thing go. But progress after that was rapid. I found bugs, I fixed them and posted the patches. Not a lot of doco other than the source, but if I got stuck I asked what seems to be a thriving and friendly online community.
It goes without saying that the PNet stuff is now rock solid for me. The Microsoft stuff is about where it was when we first started - very close but no cigar, and it seems no one has any idea how to make it progress beyond that.
I now wonder if this experience is atypical, or if I just made the wrong choice at the beginning. I am sure I would of have got Linux going by now - at the cost of a lot more effort on my part. But a little voice inside my head keeps saying - if it is this hard to make CE go, why does everybody keep using it?
I've been an embedded developer working on WinCE and PPC OS/Drivers for that past 2 years. WinCE is basically crap. The build times for the OS are 20mins+, even on a P4 2.8. The release directory has over 1Gb of data (I kid you not!), which eventually gets thrown away or squished down to about 30Mb. Actually working with WinCE is a pain, when stuff works it is great, very little setup and it just goes. When something breaks you struggle through documentation that is inadequate or plain wrong. Watching it on a debugger is no help either, because you just watch your program counter disappear down a black box of MS binary only assembly, and die somewhere.
I have to agree with another poster above, MS gets you maybe 60-80% of the way there fast and painlessly, the rest is a total nightmare. OSS stuff is often painful for the first couple of days, but once you grok the code you can do what you like without too many issues.
Great, two completely wrong posts get modded "4 - Insightful". Figures.
CE can do hard and soft real-time. Don't take my word for it - take Dedicated Systems Experts' word for it (remember, we're talking 3.0/4.x/5.0 here, not 2.0 - huge difference), or OMAC (via WindowsForDevices).
You are nobody, both sources are respected, cross-vendor, cross-platform experts.