Submitted by The new Windows Embedded website just announced the official release of Windows Embedded Compact 7, featuring SMP support for multicore CPUs, Flash 10.1, updated Silverlight for Windows Embedded technology based on Silverlight 3, and more. Update: And here’s a demo, for those interested.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=0a8709b…
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It says it runs “Customized Win 32 Applications”. It also says it runs on the ARM.
Would you have to recompile the code or doesit do some sort of emulation?
“the arm?” hehe so they have windows on watches now? =D
Not quite … but you can have .NET…
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheNETMicroFrameworkHardwareForSoftwa…
The Windows CE api is not 100% equal to what Win32 offers, since its tuned for small devices, hence the need to modify the application in some cases.
For example, in the early versions there were certain limits for the amount of running processes.
The subset of Win32 that WinCE offers can be targeted to any of the supported platforms, but you would need to recompile the code.
If this could be tweaked to run on the Zune HD that would be really cool.
I actually had a preview of this last thursday at one of Microsofts distribution partners.
One of the things that struck me as very odd was the fact that support for armv5 was not available before this version of windows embedded.
Apart from that it is interesting that more memory can be used in each process compared to CE6r3 and it was impressive to see the silverlight demonstrations.
In order to develop for this platform you are stuck with Microsoft’s last generation of developer tools–Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 3. I guess it’s obvious that all the love went to Phone 7 (sensibly), but for a final platform release this is just ridiculous IMHO. You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard to port over the Windows Phone 7 Silverlight 4 runtime…. Considering, it *is* essentially the *same platform*.
Edited 2011-03-04 12:09 UTC
No it isnt. Silverlight for embedded and Silverlight as it stands on WP7 are two different beasts.
Silverlight for embedded allows you to essentially write XAML UIs and hook them up to events in C++, its really basic.
Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 includes the full .NET stack and supports full Silverlight 3 (+ a few more things).
Silverlight for embedded doesn’t even support proper databinding.
This is mostly a tool for OEMs wishing to write their own shells over WinCE.
Here’s a decent video of the product manager explaining the use cases:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/embedded/videoGallery….
He manages to sell it, but I still don’t understand why MS isn’t supporting Visual Studio 2010. The idea of having to install two versions of Visual Studio and/or two versions of Expression Blend in order to be able to simultaneously develop for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Embedded Compact is kind of ridiculous.