Sights from ESC San Jose - keynotes, Sessions, and Labs.

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The Embedded Systems Conference is running this week in San Jose, California - The conference center that hosts the event was also the venue for the first Windows CE developer conference I attended in 1997 (I ended up sharing a hotel room with one of my colleagues that had Chicken Pox, but that's another story!).

Here's some of the sights from this years event - first up is the breakout sessions for the Windows Embedded tracks, in this case Travis Hobrla is presenting a session on porting BSPs from CE 5.0 to CE 6.0 - The session room was pretty full for most of the sessions at the event, including the 8:30am starts!

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Next door to the breakout sessions is the hands on labs room - attendees at the ESC "Conference" (not the exhibition) were given a free VIA Artigo pico-itx board, which comes pre-loaded with the CE 6.0 bootloader on board! (interestingly, the boards also run Windows XP Embedded very well) - again the labs are all very well attended.

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Over the last couple of weeks I've been building a demo that shows dynamic distribution of services across a network to devices running Windows XP Embedded (but could easily be running on Windows CE) - the core technologies are CCR/DSS (from Microsoft Robotics Studio), and a set of services I've written that wrap up Phidgets (analog sensors), Web Services, and a UI dashboard - you will need to come to the keynote on Wednesday at the event to see the demo live - I will hopefully record the demo when I'm back in the office so you can see how this all hangs together.

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Here's a shot of the keynote setup - the demo I've been working on consists of an HP laptop, a networking hub, and two Via Artigo boards (running Windows XP Embedded) - the whole setup looks quite neat and tidy, especially when compared with.... (see below)

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Here's the wiring at the back of the "Spark your Imagination" demo, the demo shows a distributed media application, and is CLEARLY a hobbyist application, just check out the wiring!!! - good job Nick McCarty!

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Here's some of the events team - from the front to back is, Olivier Bloch who has recently taken over my old job, next is Dion Hutchings, a new addition to the team who presented a session at the conference on how to choose the appropriate API/technologies for writing applications on Windows CE, next is Scott Tyler, the lab manager for the embedded team, and then finally, me!

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Look out for more news/photos from ESC...

- Mike