CE6 R3 Released To Manufacturing – includes Silverlight for Windows Embedded

Today at ESC East (Boston) Kevin Dallas, the General Manager of the Windows Embedded Business presented a keynote presentation (I missed the keynote, was flying from Seattle to Boston) that covered a number of announcements (all are listed on the following ars technica page).

One of the announcements is the release to manufacturing of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3 – this new release adds a number of new features to the existing CE 6.0 product. Note that the underlying tools and o/s architecture don’t change with the R3 release (so BSPs don’t need to change), the R3 release includes a number of new features, including Silverlight for Windows Embedded.

The Silverlight for Windows Embedded feature is a UI framework for out of browser applications (or shells) and is based on the Win32/native API, not managed code. This feature gives you the ability to have designers create UI in Expression Blend, export their XAML and then have you hook up events in Win32/C/C++ at the back end. This means that designers get to “design”, and developers get to “develop”.

I posted some information about this upcoming technology in June, here’s a link to the blog post and a video that shows what can be achieved.

- Mike