So quiet ? - And where's the Windows CE 5.0 Virtual Labs ?

You are probably wondering why the blog appears to be quieter than normal - Over the last few weeks and over the next couple of weeks I'm working on a number of CE 6.0 virtual labs, technical articles, interviews with people from across the CE team to be posted to MSDN Channel 9 and a bunch of other CE related 'stuff'.

Talking of which - the first Windows CE virtual lab is available on the MSDN Virtual Labs site - this has raised some questions about why we didn't post any Windows CE 5.0 virtual labs - the answer is fairly boring straight forward  - For a virtual lab you really need to use the emulator as a target for the lab exercises, in the upcoming CE 6.0 release the emulator is a Win32 application that interprets ARM instructions and translates to the appropriate x86/Win32 calls - since this is "just an application" the ARM emulator runs just fine in a Virtual PC environment [we're using Virtual PC to host the Virtual labs - note that even though they are called 'virtual labs' the labs are actually real :O) ] - If you want to get more information about the device emulator then you should go check out Barry Bond's blog.

For Windows CE 5.0 the emulator was an x86 emulator based on Virtual PC - you're probably aware that Virtual PC doesn't like running inside a Virtual PC environment - so that's why we're not working on Windows CE 5.0 Virtual Labs.

- Mike