MEDC 2006 Day Two - Windows CE 6, Surprise!!

Tuesday May 9th 2006, today is the first 'official' day of the Mobile and Embedded Developers Conference 2006 - The day started with a keynote given by Pieter Knook (Senior VP, Microsoft) and Todd Warren (VP, Microsoft), and the demo monkeys, Dave Karle (Windows Mobile), Colin Miller (.NET Micro Framework), and some Windows Embedded guy covering Windows CE 6, Windows XP Embedded, and Windows Embedded for Point of Service.

The keynote demos all worked perfectly, the keynote ran long by only a couple of minutes, perhaps a first for a Microsoft event!. What was the news in the keynote? - The big news is the release of the Windows CE 6 Beta to attendees at MEDC, a first look at the new tools, and some of the kernel changes within Windows CE.

Windows CE 5.0 and earlier versions of Windows CE were limited to running a maximum of 32 processes at one time, and each process can access 32MB of virtual memory. With Windows CE 6 the o/s now supports 32K processes!!!! and each process now runs in a 2GB virtual address space!!!! - Now that ROCKS!

But wait... there's more... Platform Builder now becomes a plug in to Visual Studio 2005 - this means that you now have one place to go to cofigure your operating system image, one place to build, test, and debug your operating system, and the same place to write your desktop, Windows Mobile, and Windows CE applictions! - now that's extremely cool, do I hear a "Woot!" ?

It's interesting to see that this news has made it over to /. (Slashdot) - what's even more interesting is reading the comments - how are people confused between Windows CE and Windows Mobile ? - I don't get it. This is NOT a new Windows Mobile release.

BTW - I've posted more photo's from todays keynote to the MEDC 2006 Flickr site - https://www.flickr.com/photos/medc2006team

Also, we've recorded a number of video interviews across MEDC, I expect these to be posted to the RSS feed later today - more to come from the Ask the Experts session later this evening.

- Mike