Wednesday 14 April 2010

Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Embedded CE development


UPDATE (May 2012):

Good news: Windows Embedded Compact v. Next will come with both native and managed application development support in Visual Studio 11! Furthermore there will be an updated version of the .NET Compact Framework.

It is likely (though not explicitly stated) that these new features will also be available in Visual Studio 2010.

You can find further information in my complete post here.

Have fun!



UPDATE (November 2011):
Windows Embedded Compact v. Next will come with Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio v. Next support for native Smart Device application development. Unfortunately the future of managed application development as well as the future of the .NET Compact Framework was not mentioned. Windows Embedded Compact v. Next will RTM in the second half of 2012. Find the complete Windows Embedded roadmap post here.


You are most propably aware that since the middle of April Microsoft has announced the general availability of Developer Studio 2010. The question for us Windows Embedded Developers is, however, whether or not we can use DevStudio 2010 to develop Windows CE code.

Well the answer is fairly simple - at least for the current version of Windows CE - as DevStudio 2010 does not contain "Smart Device" application development support - but you all knew that, didn't you?

But what about the upcoming version "Windows Embedded Compact 7"? As you can guess, it is quite hard to get any information around this version, planned to be released middle of 2010.

However, due to my experience with Windows Embedded Product releases and support of Windows CE development through DevStudio over the last ten years my guess ist that even with "Windows Embedded Compact 7", Windows CE code development will still be done with DevStudio 2008.

So long and thanks for all the fish!

4 comments:

cartman said...

Lame :( They do suppport .NET Compact Framework 4.0 but not native C++ bleh.

Damian Barnett said...

Well actually Visual Studio 2010 supports .NET Compact Framework 4.0 AND native c++.
Your comment does bring up another interesting question though: Which version of the .NET Compact Framework will be supported by Windows Embedded Compact 7?
Anbody willing to make a guess?

cartman said...

I checked the RC and they don't ship an ARM compiler. So no native c++ for smart devices.

Damian Barnett said...

Absolutely correct cartman. Which was also exactly what I meant with: "DevStudio 2010 does not contain "Smart Device" application development support

As far as I know DevStudio only ships with x86. Other archtictures such as arm are installed by the specific "smart device" SDK.

BTW: Thanks for reading/following the blog.