Details on my TechED Europe 2010 talks

Hi folks,

I am very excited to inform you on the dates of my talks at TechED Europe 2010 on November 8th to 12th in Berlin, Germany:

Wednesday, November 10th 1:20 pm to 2:05 pm:
Windows Embedded Automotive 7 – Creating Next Generation User Experiences (UXs)

And

Thursday, November 11th 6:00pm to 7 pm:
Advanced Application debugging techniques with Windows Embedded Compact 7

Unfortunately the rooms have not been assigned, yet. I will post an update as soon as I have further information. So stay tuned!

See you in Berlin!

Have fun!
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Engineers’ Guide to Windows Embedded

Hi folks,

get Extension Medias this years Engineers’ Guide to Windows Embedded for free (pdf file)!


In the article Grand Designs Damian Barnett, amongst others like fellow MVP Stefan Hoppe, talks about the exciting new possibilities with Windows Embedded Compact 7 as well as Windows Embedded Automotive 7. Whereas in the article Making Connections I am giving an outlook on how Windows Embedded Compact 7 could change future devices for a more and more connected world.

Have fun!
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TechED Europe 2010 talks accepted!

Hi folks,

thanks for voting for our submissions for TechED Europe 2010 from November 8th to 12th in Berlin, Germany. Your wishes will be granted: I will hold both these talks at this years TechEd Europe:

Advanced Application debugging techniques with Windows Embedded Compact 7

as well as

Windows Embedded Automotive 7 – Creating Next Generation User Experiences (UXs)



I will post an update as soon as I have further information about when and where these talks will take place. So stay tuned!

See you in Berlin!

Have fun!
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Switching target OS from project to project

Ho ho ho and joyous Season Greetings,

from time to time I come across the situation to help out in projects with different Operating Systems. And guess what... sometimes one of the Operating Systems is a Microsoft Windows CE / Windows Mobile / MS Auto etc. Now assume that first such a switch of the target OS from one project to the other is happening and that second it is most likely that both Operating Systems are mainly developed in C/C++.

So we have compilers, linkers and other parts of the tool chain including make tool, etc. Thus we all (including you) run into issues that the environment variables of the development host have most likely the same naming even if we switch the compilers, linkers, etc.

You probably just came across such a situation if e.g. the Visual Studio Platform Builder Plugin for Windows CE 6.0 Rx behaves like that:

Starting Build: blddemo -q

Some output in Build Output window during sysgen phase but less than expected... There were build errors and build.log just says

Starting sysgen phase for project ( common )
Found localized resources for Languages ( 0404 0407 0409 040C 0410 0411 0412 0413 0416 0419 041D 0804 0C0A)

Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility Version CE-6.00.1893.0
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

NMAKE : fatal error U1065: invalid option '-'
Windows CE Version (Release) (Built on Jun 30 2006 16:52:46)
Stop.

So what can possibly go wrong at that early build phase? If this is correlated to the same reason I am thinking of then this will happen in all your BSP building solutions yet.

The failure results from an nmake sysgen invoked in C:\WINCE600\PUBLIC\COMMON\CESYSGEN. Having a short look into the makefile reveals that from included cesysgen.mak the rules preproc and postproc described in makefile should be executed.

But where's this !"§$ option of that nmake error message above coming from? You never set that option?

On build console (build window) do a set MAKE. Probably you get something like:

MAKEFLAGS=-Id:/??????/target/????/usr/include

This could have been set up by other build environments and is normally or most likely not used in a Windows CE / Windows Mobile environment. If you clearly identify this to belong to some other target operating system than Windows CE / Windows Mobile and it is not used right now then remove this environment variable and run your build command again.

set MAKEFLAGS=
blddemo -q

This is most likely doing the trick...

To wish you the special gifts of this holiday season - Peace, Joy, Lasting Happiness and a working tool chain to build your favorite OS.

-- Oliver
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MS Auto vs. Windows Automotive

As Microsoft has now also added Live Search for Devices (LS4D - one of the key features of Windows Embedded NavReady - which we will talk about in one of our next posts) to MS Auto and Windows Automotive I thought this would be a good opportunity to answer the question "What's the difference between MS Auto and Windows Automotive?" and to get rid of some of the confusion around these two platforms - oh yes and then there is Windows Mobile for Automotive and ...

Fortunately Microsoft offers a Platform Guidance Datasheet showing the main differences between the two platforms.


As you can see Windows Automotive 5.0 is based on Windows Embedded CE 5.0 ( same as NavReady 2009 ) and offers the same full flexibility whereas Microsoft Auto 3.0 is based on Windows Embedded CE 6.0 and provides a standard hard- and software platform enabling OEMs and Tier1s to build solutions a lot faster.

Fiat's Blue&Me, by the way, which features Elektrobit's Navigation solution is based on Windows Mobile for Automotive which is the predecessor of MS Auto.

So long and thanks for all the fish!
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