Windows Archive

In its drive to be taken seriously by the embedded community, Microsoft Corp. announced this week that it will make a broad offering of the Windows XP Embedded operating system through a special preview aimed at developers. Windows XP Embedded, being developed in parallel with the desktop version of XP, will reportedly be unveiled as a product late this year. The company said this week, however, that it is now offering the second beta edition of XP Embedded on its Web site. Developers visiting the site can also order a CD (priced at approximately $8 USD) containing the operating system. Microsoft executives said they offered the beta version as a result of demand from developers.

"Windows XP is more than just a pretty face. This top-to-bottom overhaul of the Windows operating system has something for everyone from families to business users." Read the whole of the exhaustive review of Microsoft's new product over at ZDNet.

Since the original article, first appeared some months ago, Microsoft has released Beta2 of Visual Studio.NET. As with any beta software, changes were inevitable, so ExtremeTech are now updates the article and accompanied source code to reflect the changes made. According to the article, the API changes in C#, in some cases made the language too different from Java, while in other cases brought the two languages closer. It is a very interesting read, as the article has a code-to-code comparison between the two languages. Also, looking at the archives of ExtremeTech we found this very interesting article, which discusses the kernel enhancements that WindowsXP will feature and also mentions the nifty tricks they added to get around the Registry bloat and slowness when searching for a Registry Key.

The company announced that its Windows Advanced Server, Limited Edition, is now available for computers based on Intel's 64-bit Itanium chip. Microsoft said that Compaq Computer, Dell Computer, HP and IBM will start shipping servers running the new operating system within 30 days. The OS is based on the Win2000 codebase, while its 64-bit WindowsXP version will be available next year. In the meantime, Internet Explorer 6 was made available for download yesterday, and it includes several new features. Our Take: While most of the new IE6 features are pretty reduntant for me, the new version fixes an important crashing bug I had with the browser when browsing specific sites (Sourceforge and even Apple to mention a few) that utilized, through javascript, the PC clock. The bug was only reproducible when some special ASP server software was also installed in the same PC (which I had installed). Glad to see at least that specific bug (DLL-hell, to be more specific) go away!