August blog entry ;-)

I just realized that August is practically over, and I haven't produced a single blog entry this month ... got to change this immediately.

Well, I've spent the last three weeks at home, recovering from knee surgery and an accompanying inflammation. Not a nice thing to be forced to use crutches when you're used to be running around. But it's getting better by now, I can at least walk again, and I'll be back in my office next Monday - finally! (You don't get to be very productive at home when two little kids are competing for your attention all day long...) On the following Saturday, I'll enter a plane for L.A., going to the PDC - can't wait to get there again, PDC '03 was such an exciting thing, hope this one will be a huge success again.

At home I spent some time playing with Platform Builder for Windows CE 5.0 (great!). I'm going to dive into embedded topics a little deeper in the future, so I have to look at a lot of things that I only had superficial knowledge of up to now.

On that occasion I (again) realized that there is currently (Beta 2) no Windows CE 5.0 emulator image in Visual Studio 2005, though there is a project template for that platform. A friendly soul inside MS pointed me to the possibility of building my own (ARM) WinCE 5.0 image in Platform Builder, but since I'm not yet very experienced doing that, he provided me with a "home-grown" image for the new device emulator. Great stuff!

Which brings me to a question to you, dear reader: Do you think we (MS) should provide such an emulator image (CE 5.0), be it by RTM or afterwards? Would you benefit from that, would it make your life or certain decisions easier? If so, why? Or are you creating your own images anyway? Please give me feedback on that if you don't mind. Your opinion counts.