RTOS Gets Revamped

Nov. 6, 2006

Windows CE 6 is a marked improvement for Microsoft's smallest operating system, which has big aspirations. It can now manage up to 32k processes, each with an address space of 2 Gbytes. That's probably a bit much for a cell phone, but this embedded real-time operating system (RTOS) is finding a home in a wide range of very demanding applications. This incarnation supports the latest Windows .NET Compact Framework 2.0. It also will support the recently announced Network Media Device Feature Pack (see "Feature Pack Enhances Embedded Operating System" at www. electronicdesign.com, ED Online 12450).

Microsoft has made a developer's job easier with improvements such as making the system configuration program, Platform Builder, a Visual Studio 2005 plug-in. Visual Studio is Microsoft's integrated development environment (IDE) for creating applications and device drivers. It handles all Microsoft operating systems and languages. The plug-in lets developers remain in a single IDE for embedded application development and system targeting. Windows CE 6 also uses a new device driver model with a 4-Gbyte address space. (2 Gbytes are for an application.) Developers now have the choice of user-mode or kernel-mode device drivers.
www.microsoft.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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