If you are an application developer and you’re tempted by “the dark side” (Embedded devices), don’t miss this series of webcasts organized by Arrow and Adeneo Embedded:
http://www.arroweurope.com/news-events/arrow-events/detail/article/arrow-ocs-and-adeneo-embedded-windows-embedded-standard-7-webinars.html
In a series of four webcasts I’ll try to explain why using an embedded OS (Windows Embedded Standard 7) can be a good way to improve the reliability of your system and reduce maintenance costs and issues.
If you currently develop applications that run on dedicated (or almost dedicated) PCs you are already developing embedded devices! But not using the right OS may generate configuration issues, security problems, maintenance nightmares. Windows Embedded Standard 7 allows you to leverage Windows 7 features you need and leave out the rest, making your system more secure, standardized and less resource hungry.
Yesterday I received my copy of “Pro Windows Embedded Compact 7” by Avi Kcholi.
http://www.apress.com/9781430241799
It’s a great book for people that have some experience and knowledge Windows Embedded Compact 7 and want to learn the “black magic” behind device driver development on this operating system.
The book guides the reader trough different aspects of drivers (and BSP) development, starting from the foundation and reaching some advanced topics that are not covered in the on-line reference.
Here’s a list of the different chapters to give you an idea of the book contents:
Chapter 1: The Foundation of Device Driver Development for Windows Embedded Compact
Chapter 2: The Tools of The Trade
Chapter 3: Design your Device Driver First!
Chapter 4: Mastering the Hardware Environment
Chapter 5: Device Driver Registry Settings
Chapter 6: Understanding Device Driver Types
Chapter 7: The Essence of Stream Device Drivers
Chapter 8: Device Driver I/O and Interrupts
Chapter 9: Device I/O Control Handling
Chapter 10: Network Driver Interface Specification and Network Device Drivers
Chapter 11: Debugging Device Drivers
Chapter 12: Using CTK to Develop Test Code
It’s more than 250 pages of rich technical contents that will help people that want to approach the “dark side” of development, working in close contact to the hardware 
I had the honor of reviewing it as Technical Reviewer and I hope that readers will appreciate the amount of technical knowledge provided by this book.
Per tutti gli appassionati di sistemi embedded e per chi voglia approcciare il mondo embedded nel modo più semplice e divertente è ora disponibile un'ottima risorsa in italiano: tinyclr.it.
Qui potrete scoprire come è facile controllare device semplici e complessi usando .NET e gli stessi linguaggi che si utilizzano per la programmazione di sistemi PC o webserver.
Buon divertimento!
If you want to increase your knowledge about Windows Embedded Compact and want to hear my voice, you can go to the brand new Windows Embedded Compact 7 Online Training website and check all the videos (many of them recorded by me, so be prepared for a funny accent!) showing many of the features and tools of this real time embedded OS from Microsoft.
So, buy the pop-corn, sit on your most confortable chair and enjoy the show!
The new roadmap of Windows Embedded has been announced, this is great news for anyone that wants to use Windows Embedded technologies in her/his device. Roadmaps are usually stuff for marketing people, but as a technician is important to know that you are basing your product on a system that is going to be supported for some years and that you can evolve it and will not have to re-design it completely to change its OS (unless this proves to be more convenient, of course!).
Here you can read the press release:
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/Features/2011/nov11/11-14RoadMap.mspx
and here Olivier Bloch’s summary (the part that should interest tech people):
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/obloch/archive/2011/11/14/windows-embedded-roadmap-update.aspx
Per chi ha tempo e voglia di fare quattro chiacchiere sui sistemi embedded microsoft, il sottoscritto parteciperà al TOSM, dal 16 al 18 Novembre a Torino e, in qualità di speaker, a WPC 2011, il principale evento formativo Italiano per le tecnologie Microsoft dal 22 al 24 Novembre a Milano (Assago).
Saranno due occasioni per presentare queste tecnologie a un’audience un po’ diversa da quella che di solito frequenta gli eventi embedded e per scambiare idee e opinioni con chi non lavora sui sistemi embedded ma, magari, pensa di poterli utilizzare in futuro.
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Windows 8
Just like many thousands of geeks around the world I downloaded the Windows 8 preview from Microsoft’s website:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516
and spent some time playing with it.
Being an embedded developer I don’t have any powerful machine lying unused in my office, so I installed Windows 8 on a very low-spec machine, a 1.6GHz Atom with 1GB of RAM and a 120GB HD (taken from an old mac). First of all I must say that I’m pretty impressed by the responsiveness of the new UI. I’m not saying that the OS can do magic and make that machine running faster than my i5 laptop… some operations are very slow, but the system remains responsive and, at least, pushing the windows key brings you back to the new “home screen” (it’s no longer a desktop and with all those tiles… maybe we can call it “floortop”) in less than a second, this is an effect of the new WinRT API that use asynchronous calls for any activity that could take more than a few milliseconds, I suppose. As an user this is something that I really appreciate (being watching at a “frozen” PC waiting that it takes some of its precious CPU time to take care of your actions is quite frustrating!), as a developer I’m very interested in discovering if this new model will provide the same ease of use and robustness of the synchronous one.
I had a chance to play with the metro UI using my Windows Phone 7, so this is not a surprise. I appreciate the clean visual layout and the clever usage of information text that provides more information than the one provided by “traditional” icon-based user interfaces. On the other side, knowing that this implementation of the metro UI is not compatible with the Windows Phone one makes this system look already obsolete compared to the new wave of tablets powered by Win8 that is going to reach the market as soon as the OS will be available next year.
I didn’t like much the “integration” with the desktop that now looks like an external app (it reminds me of “Microsoft Bob”… but many of the people out there are too young to remember it), I would like to see a better integration between the new user interface and “legacy” desktop application but, honestly, I don’t have any idea about how to do it better…
The only problem I had during setup was with the creation of a new partition on the hard drive that come from an old mac. Quitting the installer (that seems to be based on WinPE3, like the one used by Windows 7 and Windows Embedded Standard 7) and selecting “advanced tools\command prompt” allowed me to execute diskpart and fix the issue by cleaning existing partitions and converting the disk partition table to MBR.
As an embedded developer I would like to see how the new OS performs on the Arm architecture, but we will have to wait for some more time (I think that “installing” it on an Arm-based device will be more complicated and maybe only OEMs will be allowed to do it) and I would like also to know if and when this new cool technology will be made available on embedded devices. I think that many kind of devices could benefit from the rich UI and the new “sandboxed” app model and the fact that the developer preview runs so well even on low-spec hardware make me positive about the fact that its adoption on embedded devices could be fast and compatible with the low-cost, low-power requirements of the embedded world.
This new book targets embedded developers that want to use the latest release of the Windows CE/Windows Embedded Compact OS family.
It has been written by Samuel Phung (that wrote also the excellent “Professional Windows CE 6.0”), Thierry Joubert and David Jones (that released many very useful tools for Windows Embedded in the past). They are great developers and also very good trainers and writers, and I’m pretty sure that they will provide a great amount of knowledge to people wanting to discover the (embedded) “dark side” of computing.
You can find more information (and buy it, of course!) on its amazon page or on the publisher (Wrox) website.
If you plan to use Silverlight for Windows Embedded on an i.MX53 from Freescale, give a look at:
http://www.adeneo-embedded.com/en/About-Us/News/Silverlight-OpenGL-Rendering-Plug-in-iMX53-QSb
Adeneo Embedded developed an OpenGL rendering plugin that will offload most of the rendering to the dedicate hardware and will provide a more responsive UI leaving plenty of CPU cycles for your own code.
This will lead to a better user experience for the end-users of your devices.
Sorry for not having been active on this blog (and forums) lately, I’ve been very busy with my new activity as a self-employee, but now I reached an agreement with my boss (myself) and I’ll try to post more regular updates here.
If you want to discover something about the latest releases of Windows Embedded operating systems you’ll have many chances in the upcoming weeks.
Connect with Windows Embedded
The “Connect with Windows Embedded” event at MS-Italy headquarters in Milan will provide a good chance to meet me (I’ll be doing the Windows Embedded Compact 7 Hands On Lab and a brief Compact 7 presentation during the morning) and to discover the new features of Compact 7 and Standard 7 SP1, seeing those operating systems running on cool devices (many of them provided by Adeneo-Embedded).
You can register here:
http://connectwithembedded.com/it/index
Windows Embedded Compact 7 Workshop
On June 14th and 16th I’ll be in Leipzig and Stuttgart for a one day workshop on Windows Embedded Compact 7 on Freescale’s i.MX53 platforms. This workshop will give to the attendees a chance to experience the Compact 7 development tools on one of the most interesting chips around.
My session will be in english (sorry for my German friends… I promise I’ll try to learn some German for the next time!):
https://www.silica.com/events/seminar/silica/view/windows-embedded-compact-7-workshop.html
Windows Embedded Compact 7 Training
If you want to start your Windows Embedded Compact 7 project in a good way, the best option is to attend the Windows Embedded Compact 7 training that Adeneo Embedded has organized in Bologna:
http://www.adeneo-embedded.com/en/layout/set/public/Media/All-static-html/Invitation_training_WEC7_Bologna_June2011
This will give you also a good chance to taste “Spaghetti alla Bolognese” in their hometown!
The 3+1 days training will give you an overview of the operating systems and deep knowledge of the tools, the driver model and some of the new features of Compact 7. Those 4 days of training will save you a lot of development (and debugging) time!