| This book has been based on Windows NT, Visual Studio, Small Business Server, MSN, and a few other product team build processes at Microsoft. Embedded device builds is a category or variation of this process that deserves at least some mention in this book. In a way, the builds for embedded devices are in a category all by themselves. That is because Microsoft licenses the operating systems to different vendors, who then customize it and use it in their devices. Microsoft also sells portable devices that use these operating systems. In this appendix, I touch on how Microsoft performs Windows CE builds and point out the minor variations on the process described in the chapters of this book. This appendix is not intended to be a comprehensive explanation; numerous custom tools are needed to successfully create a CE build. Refer to the links at the end of this appendix for more details. When someone talks about embedded systems at Microsoft, he is either talking about Windows CE or Windows XPe (XP Embedded). As of this writing, there is no Windows Server Embedded system. Mike Hall, technical product manager in the mobile and embedded devices (MED) group, explains the difference between the operating systems best: A question that comes up at every customer meeting is how to choose between Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded. The answer can be pretty simple... Windows XP Embedded is a componentized version of Windows XP Pro, broken down to approximately 12,000 components, 9,000 device drivers, and 3,000 operating system technologies. Because Windows XP Embedded is a componentized version of Windows XP Pro [that] only runs on x86 processor and PC architecture hardware, the great thing is that desktop applications and drivers will work with Windows XP Embedded without changes. There are embedded specific technologies added to XP Pro: the ability to run headless, boot from read-only media or boot from the network, resume multiple times from a hibernation file, and device update technologies. Image sizes scale from about 40MB. Windows XP Embedded is not natively real-time but can be real-time through adding third-party real-time extensions. Windows CE is a small footprint (200KB and up), hard real-time, componentized operating system that runs on x86, MIPS, ARM, and SH4 processor cores. There is no reliance on BIOS or PC architecture hardware. Windows CE exposes approximately 2,000 Win32 APIs (compared to the 20,000 APIs exposed on Windows XP Pro). The operating system is UNICODE based but does support APIs to convert to/from ASCII and ANSI. As far as application development is concerned, Windows XP Embedded runs standard desktop applications, so you could use TurboPascal, Visual Studio, or any or your favorite desktop application (or driver) development tools. Windows CE has two tool choices: eMbedded Visual C++ for "native" code development, and Visual Studio .NET 2003 for "managed" application development. Hopefully this gives you the 20,000-ft view of the differences between Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded. I have taken some general information from the Windows CE build documentation, deleted some terms and references to internal tools that would have been confusing to you, and included it next. This should give you a good idea of the steps it takes to create a CE build. |
