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Microsoft Makes Surprise CE 6 Release
An anonymous reader writes "Unexpectedly, Microsoft has released a beta of Windows CE 6, at its mobile developer's conference (MEDC) this week. CE is the real-time OS that underpins Windows Mobile and Microsoft's other device software stacks for phones, PDAs, set-top boxes, and the like. CE 6 looks to be a major rewrite, featuring the capability to support several orders of magnitude more concurrent processes and virtual memory. Also new is support for MS's .NET IDE. Together, these new capabilities seem calculated to morph CE from a closed-box, off-the-shelf OS into a more customizable OS."
Meanwhile Microsoft's Major new consumer operating system has been pushed back several times, and talked up every chance they get. I think this says a lot about the order of importance of the mobile OS to people. Having worked in retail I can honestly say nobody ever asked me if that palm I was selling them came with a windows based OS or which OS it came with, yet with people who bought desktops I'd always get this question: "Does it come with XP?". This was, of course, years after XP was common, and computers really weren't packaged with anything else.
I don't think this release was so much a secret as it was an unadvertised release. If microsoft thought there would be a huge public reaction to this, they would have talked it up publicly before they even started work on it.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
What was the surprise? Microsoft showed off a new version of its mobile OS to a mobile developer's conference, or that they included .Net? (.Net. You know, that dev platform that Microsoft would port to your bathroom shower head if they could).
...WinCE just makes me want to wince.
Rhapsody in Numbers
"Also new is support for MS's .NET IDE. Together, these new capabilities seem calculated to morph CE from a closed-box, off-the-shelf OS into a more customizable OS."
.NET applications can run on the CF 2.0 under CE and can be cable debugged, or remotely accessed using the RDP client.
CE is hardly closed and not really "off the shelf". For starters the source code for the OS is available as part of the platform builder tool. Also, the platform builder tool allows you to create releases of windows CE with different configurations, drivers and applications pre-isntalled. It is the equavlent of being about to build a custom image of windows XP, sans the explorer GUI interface (Desktop), or other system services such as RDP. The only problem is that CE looks about as old as it is, it will be nice to have a UI update. It is also the only OS that MS makes that is a "hard" real time OS and whose kernel does not provide GUI services. CE is also currently suported by VS.NET 2005, though not on the native C++ side. However,
Um do you know what a realtime operation system is? Glad someone modded you insightful, because your post was truly that.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
This ties in with Microsoft's renewed partnership with Qualcom:
_ qualcomm_alliance/
.NET will help support a lot of distributed apps and better concurrent apps and memory handling will allow for 'media-rich' phones as phones and PDAs converge.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/08/microsoft
Microsoft and Qualcom wish to make common cause against Nokia -Qualcom due to CDMA and Microsoft due to Symbian OS and mobile Linux. Microsoft has had difficulty in getting any major manufacturer to use their platform on phones due to manufacturer's rightful fears of being commoditized as PC makers have been.
-that said, they're both bastards and the success of this venture will lead to more microsoft lockin.
-What's the speed of dark?
*Crickets chirping*
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"Is this thing... on?"
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
While I'm certainly no fan of the Windows family of operating systems on desktops or servers (or PDAs, for that matter), I've recently found myself appreciating a Windows Embedded product. When I bought a new Honda in November, I fell in love with the navigation system - so much so that when I sought to purchase another new vehicle last month, the nav system was a requirement.
:) But, if it helps me get a better navigation system, I'll sell my soul to Redmond.
After some research and discussion, I was dishearted to find that the navigation systems I had grown to love so much were actually powered by Windows Automotive Edition - based on Windows Embedded, which is a flavor of Windows CE. While I cannot actually tell (by any means) that the system is Windows-based, it is very stable, responsive, fast, and user friendly - most of which is probably of function of the application and not the operating system.
All that said, I'm still psyched about CE 6 if it provides further media access features, hardware drivers, and other niceitys.
I have real pain saying I'm psyched about a Windows product as a Linux and Mac OS geek!
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
Realtime has absolutely nothing to do with the relative speed of the OS or GUI. What it means is that the OS can *guarantee* a response to an input within a defined period of time. While that time is typically very short, you could still technically be realtime if you could demonstrate guaranteed response within 24 hours (though you wouldn't be particularly useful).
Again, technically that's "hard" realtime. "Soft" realtime system are just pretenders that can't really guarantee anything and just look kinda like a preemptive OS with priority levels and the like.
Linux is not a realtime system (without very specific extensions anyway). You don't really want a general purpose OS as "realtime" anyway - it just doesn't help things at all and tends to complicate the processing model.
CE 5.0 (and probably 6.0) are not hard realtime systems. Even at the OEM level (where you can actually write real ISRs) there's no guaranteed response time, just a bunch of realtime looking stuff. At the Application Developer, or even Device Driver level (ISTs, not ISRs) you are so far from realtime it really doesn't make much sense to talk about it in those terms.
If you read between the lines on this report from Microsoft you can glean most of what I've said.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
"Also new is support for MS's
Windows CE is already supported by VS.NET 2005. And I don't just mean for
The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines several as meaning "some... fewer than many" and many as "a large number of".
Given that, I think it's fair to assume that three is not too large a number to be "several"; certainly, about that many is what I generally mean when I say "several". Working on that basis, then, supporting "several orders of magnitude more concurrent processes" means supporting about three orders of magnitude more processes. Three orders of magnitude is 1000 (=10^3). If we up "several" to four or five, we have 10,000 or 100,000.
Perhaps the OS can support that many concurrent processes (although I admit to having my doubts), but I'd be amazed if any hardware it runs on does.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
WinCE is Microsoft's stab at a Linux type of OS. With packages, dependencies, and multiple architecture support, I believe it is the future of Microsoft -- eventually to replace Windows altogether... It's the complete rewrite of Windows we've all been waiting for.
Here is my home page.
Wow! I am looking forward to being able to run "several orders of magnitude more concurrent processes." That will be 5, maybe 6 thousand concurrent processes, probably as many as 100 times as many as on my server at home! Cool!
Win CE is a collection of services that can be used to build a custom embedded OS. Windows Mobile is one of these custom OS's. for more info: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikehall/archive/2005/03/15/ 395958.aspx
On a true hard RTOS, you have to worry about all sorts of artifacts like priority inversion, not holding exclusive locks for non-deterministic lengths of time and other stuff like that. With a general purpose operating system, it's discouraged but the system will let you do it.
The fact that you can't wait on stuff for too long adds a whole bunch of complexity to your processing - mainly in the error handling and timeout handling code where you have to decide how to handle errors in what is very likely an unattended environment.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
The fact that people aren't even aware of their reliance on Windows CE is exactly the reason why it is so important Microsoft keeps on the ball with CE releases.
I think you underestimate the sheer volume of Windows CE users, and almost none of them even know it. Most of your major car manufacurers use CE in their newer vehicles, especially luxury cars. It is in cable boxes, dvrs, exercise equipment, dish washers and point of sale systems... It is everywhere and being used more every day.
And what is so wrong with XP that a new version is needed in a rush? Keep in mind that Vista is designed as a new generation of operating system, taking advantage of it (or even using it) will require pretty advanced and expensive hardware... Microsoft needs to wait until people are ready for it.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...