Windows CE Device Emulator Goes Shared Source

An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Microsoft has released their device emulator for Windows CE under a shared source license making it available to experimentation and teaching. From the article: 'The Device Emulator can be built as a standalone Windows application, or as the default emulator within Visual Studio 2005 running under the Device Emulator Manager, according to Microsoft. A 473 KB compressed file containing the Device Emulator shared source code is available for download' on the Microsoft site."

Not bad...

[MaestroSartori]

...although the license doesn't allow developing a non-MS platform using the emulator, or porting the emulator to a non-MS platform. So all you Linuxy types are shit out of luck! ;)

Still nice to see things become a little more open, I suppose.

The first hit is always free.

[AHuxley]

Same old game plan to push a generational business model.
Get a generation interested (read addicted) and then sell up.
Lock in the hardware and software and wait for the developer productivity to pay it all back.

no, that's just called "evil"

[m874t232]

hey released the .Net Framework source code (called ROTOR) under the same license (Shared Source). Though you can't use it commercially, it actually compiles on multiple platforms. Good for students and guys working on alternate implementations, though you cant lift code from it. They also started a new code sharing community called CodePlex.

Unlike, say, Stallman, I have no problem with closed source software; I think closed source software will fail in the long run, but I also think it is perfectly legitimate for companies to attempt to make closed source software their business model.

In contrast, I think "shared source" is sleazy and evil: it's an attempt to entangle students and users in proprietary software licenses and to get people to work for Microsoft for free. Sun has tried to do the same thing with their "community licenses".

If someone offers you source code, don't look at it unless it comes under a genuine open source license; anything else is too risky.

Re:Enough for anybody!

[tobybuk]

I've not seen the source but placing an ASSERT(0) is a very valid thing to do.

All software is full of assumptions that a particular path can never be taken. By placing ASSERT(0) in these places it alerts a developer running debug code that there is either a problem in their code or more likely a device driver is behaving badly.

It's a technique used by experienced mature developers..

Re:Not bad...

[Svartalf]

You missed this detail:

"Academic purposes" means non-commercial teaching, research, and personal experimentation while attending or employed by an accredited educational institution. Academic purposes expressly excludes commercial uses.

Ths modifies all the above. It means unless you're under this category specifically, you don't have a license for the items you mentioned.

Re:DREAMCAST!

[tlhIngan]

No. This is because while it was capable of running CE, most of the machines out there didn't use it because of licensing and difficulty of use issues. They did like they always did with a console- they programmed to the bare metal. It's also worth noting that you'd
have to come up with an SH4 emulator as this is for ARM/XScale versions of CE only, along with some way of emulating the behavior of a PowerVR chip because they didn't come up with DirectX for CE (It's part of the reason they use Embedded XP in the X-Box...).


Actually, DirectX has been a part of Windows CE for years now. It was originally part of Windows CE 2.12 with the optional DirectX Pak add-on, and available built in inside of WinCE 3.0 and onwards. WinCE4 (WinCE.NET) made it more visible, and I think WinCE 5 now supports Direct3D (Mobile).

Windows *MOBILE* only acquired DirectX as of WinMo 5 (Magneto) (the reason was to support DirectShow for camera support rather than try to do a Video4Windows thing). Of course, they didn't take the CE version of DirectX, but ported DirectX from Windows XP. Big PITA when you're trying to write a driver that supports Windows CE (part of Windows Embedded) and Windows Mobile because of these differences in DirectX.

Here's a bit from the Microsoft Windows CE 5.0 documentation on say, DirectDrawCreate()

Requirements
OS Versions: Windows CE 2.12 and later. Version 2.12 requires DXPAK 1.0 or later.
Header: Ddraw.h.
Link Library: Ddraw.lib.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/wcemultimedia5/html/wce50lrfdirectd rawcreate.asp [microsoft.com]