PowerToy: PipeTerm for Virtual PC 2007

We recently released a CE 6.0 Binary BSP for Virtual PC 2007 – This can be quite useful for building and testing CE 6.0 images on your desktop PC, in much the same way as building and testing CE 6.0 operating system images using the existing ARM Device Emulator that ships with the CE 6.0 product.

When using the Virtual PC BSP you have the ability to “package” a CE 6.0 operating system image in a .VHD file (Virtual Hard Drive file) and boot stand-alone without the need for Platform Builder, this can be quite useful for demos, to share a stand-alone operating system image with your colleagues who don’t need Platform Builder and are only interested in writing applications from Visual Studio.

But… What if you want to see debug information from a Virtual PC based CE 6.0 operating system image? – We’ve just released a new PowerToy to the MSDN Code Gallery called PipeTerm, this is a handy utility that displays debug out from your CE 6.0 based operating system image running in Virtual PC 2007. Here’s a link to the MSDN Code Gallery PipeTerm project.

Virtual PC has the ability to map a serial port from the guest operating system (COM1 or COM2) either to a physical COM port on your development PC or to a named pipe, if you have a handy utility like PipeTerm sat listening on the other end of the pipe then you can display any data being pumped out of the serial port from the guest operating system running in Virtual PC 2007.

Enough explanation, it’s probably easier to just show you the utility running – check out the video below.

Video: Windows Embedded CE 6.0 PipeTerm Demo

- Mike