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."

This shows publicity priorities...

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.

Surprise?

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).

Ya know...

...WinCE just makes me want to wince.

Wow

I haven't used Windows CE since my old Hitachi S3 Windows CE palmtop (which I still have today), on that thing it's basically a black and white Windows 95 without dos.

Has it changed much since then?

Hardly Closed

"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."

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, .NET applications can run on the CF 2.0 under CE and can be cable debugged, or remotely accessed using the RDP client.

Transcript of Press Conference

*Crickets chirping*
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*taps microphone*
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"Is this thing... on?"

-1 off-topic

I love the "An anonymous reader writes...". what's next? "In a related news, an anonymous writer reads..." ? the allways surprising crowd of /...
Otherwise I couldn't care less about the announcement. I swear

So..

So, the new Windows Mobile 5 that just came out is already going to be replaced. I know its early, but come on, give us some time to enjoy having the newest OS for our mobile devices.

I hate to admit it, but...

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 [honda.com] in November, I fell in love with the navigation system - so much so that when I sought to purchase another new vehicle [honda.com] last month, the nav system was a requirement.

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 [microsoft.com] - 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! :) But, if it helps me get a better navigation system, I'll sell my soul to Redmond.

Re:I hate to admit it, but...

I once asked my "navigation system" which way we went from here and she looked at the map and said, "Up."

Maybe it's time to upgrade.

KFG

Correction regarding IDE

"Also new is support for MS's .NET IDE."

Windows CE is already supported by VS.NET 2005. And I don't just mean for .NET applications. I have written C++ apps using VC8 for deployment to WinCE 5.0.

Pocket Internet Explorer?

What a let down. I was praying for Pocket Internet Explorer to get a shot in the arm. This release is great for both embedded developers and ISVs, but I got nothin! Then again, I might get a surprise ... when I find out my new fangled PVR runs windows (ce) outside of a firewall. Surprise!

Several orders of magnitude?

The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines several [cambridge.org] as meaning "some... fewer than many" and many [cambridge.org] 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.

Hope they make it faster

I have a smart phone (SX66) and even with it's 400Mhz processor it's not what I would call fast.

I'm pretty confused since there isn't that much screen to refresh (320x200 or so) and it's not running a bunch of stuff.

Has anyone ever profiled the OS? I'm really curious if the hardware is just sucky and slow (i.e. really slow bus, etc) or if the OS is just not well structured.

I can remember the old 4.7Mhz days and can't how a 100x increase in clock speed can produce something so unimpressive in performance.

Of course this is all 'seat of the pants' observations since I seen any benchmark apps out there.

Microsoft's Version of Linux

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.

Re:Microsoft's Version of Linux

Well, its kind of necessary given the fact that CE has to run on some pretty limited and varied hardware. It's also very different from Linux in that it's a real-time OS and can run without interrupts enabled.

Orders of magnitude!

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!

what is it

with Microsoft and major rewrites ("CE 6 looks to be a major rewrite") ??? As if the new one is so much better because it was rewritten? Given that there was hardly ground breaking research in OS design unveiled in the last few years, does that mean that the "old" WinCE code base was shit? I mean multi-millions in development costs in writing WinCE in the past for naught? Does MS not have competent SW architects and coders so that already written code can be used as a basis for new releases? Rewritten code == newly written bugs. How stupid.

Lol.

>> CE is the real-time OS that underpins Windows Mobile...

CE Reatime. LOL.... Whatever. I guess Microsoft must have patented the definition of realtime or something.

Release? How odd...

I thought Microsoft had forgotten the meaning of the word 'release'. They haven't seemed to have been able to do it for quite awhile now.

CE 6 looks to be a major rewrite

So can we call it Vista CE?

M$....M is for morons

So let me get this straight. They are getting ready to release a new version when they're just finally getting Windows Mobile 2005 phones to market. They haven't even fixed the bugs.

I swear...they're !@#$% morons.

- Saj

PS - Slashdot is a moron too.

a) a few symbols as alternative to swearing != ascii art
b) 5 symbols != lame. :P

Realtime

I bet this is as much realtime as Windows XP Embedded is embedded. That is, it probably squeaks by the dictionary definition if you squint hard enough...

Every 18 months has been the norm

A new version release every 18 months has been the norm so calling it "surprising" is naive. You won't see a GA user product for a year or more, though. One can only hope these won't be the junk that WM5 (CE5-based) user devices are.

Upgrades?

Most PDA manufacturers will not even bother releasing an upgrade for pre-existing devices, which means if you want the newest fangled Windows CE, you have to buy a new device. Glad I read this as I will put off buying a new PDA until CE 6 is supplied in the box on the device.

Virtual Memory on a PDA?

The article really didn't explain this and it doesn't make sense. Isn't virtual memory a segment of hard drive space that is used as RAM? I am guessing they mean something else or it's just a marketing term, probably the latter.

Obligtory Star Wars Reference

linux fanboi: These are not the updates your looking for...

slashdotter: these are not the updates we're looking for

Heart monitoring devices...

...running Windows CE?

oohh i'm feeling very lightheaded now, think i'm going to pass ouqef-\/.bafs,.

Re:Windows CE realtime?

Um do you know what a realtime operation system [wikipedia.org] is? Glad someone modded you insightful, because your post was truly that.

Re:Windows CE realtime?

I guess if you're counting ocean waves you could call it realtime.

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 [microsoft.com] report from Microsoft you can glean most of what I've said.

Re:Last time i checked...

Actually, what microsoft calls it, is a solution. A set of packaged technologies that are supposedly designed to work together for a better business experience or some other crap like that.
.NET VM is one of their present technologies that's designed to knock off java, but far from the only thing present. Including a lot of things that people already pay for, such as visual studio.
If you go to the .NET homepage [microsoft.com], you'll not see any sort of runtime environment mentioned.

Re:Windows CE realtime?

Troll? Come on people. No Windows is anything like an RTOS. You don't go to the trouble and expense of writing a real-time OS so you can run sol.exe and some mobile version of Outlook. You use a real-time OS when you've got time-critical control systems and things absolutely must happen within a certain time. You won't see one on a $300 PDA.

Re:Microsoft windows cE 6.0

That has absolutely not been my company's experience with doing development in India. Indian staff and offices *are* much cheaper, sometimes orders of magnitude cheaper than US offices, but the productivity out of our Indian offices is nowhere near that of others. Going forward I've been told India will be used mainly for doing QA work. Another common complaint I hear about India is the very high turnover. It's like the old dot-com days in Silicon Valley where everyone only stays at a job for a few months, just long enough to learn what they need to hop to the next better paying job. Ironically, we employ a large number of Indians in our California offices as well, and *their* productivity is typically pretty high. Heck, at this point, the California engineering teams are mostly Indian, with almost 100% of the Engineering management being Indian as well.

Now, Canada, on the other hand, I've been told that our Canadian offices are a much better value. Not as cheap as India, but much cheaper than the US (not only are salaries cheaper, but the company doesn't pay as much if anything for health benefits) and the productivity of the Canadian offices are fairly high.

I'm pretty sure we do some development out of Israel as well, but I honestly haven't heard much from the engineering managers about those offices, so I don't know what the costs and productivity are like there.

Re:The Pro version is less than $3 per unit, and f

$3/unit seems pretty heavy to me. My bosses were not too happy when a vendor wanted $1/unit for a substantial subsystem and we build medical equipment (it's expensive but the user will pay for it anyway).

Don't expect $15/unit winCE showing up anywhere in less then luxury good items. The economics doesn't make much sense...

Cheers,
Ben