Have you heard about the Windows CE Shared Source program?

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Have you heard about the Windows CE Shared Source program?

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If you are already familiar with this resource and have used it to help your development work, then Microsoft wants to here from *you*. Skip to the bottom of this email, click on the link, and take the survey. Your input will help with work going on right now to improve this important program.

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If you are not familiar with this program, or have heard about it but want to learn more, then read on. Most mobile and embedded developers, it seems, have not accessed the CE source code. For example, many Windows Mobile application developers that I speak with do not know about it. Or they know about it, but have not tried to find it -- perhaps thinking that it is too expensive, or only available with some onerous licensing agreement.

===== What Is CE Shared Source Program??

Microsoft introduced the Windows CE shared source program back with Windows CE 3.0. It was introduced to help developers in debugging Windows CE projects, and also in learning about this OS. It was such a success that Microsoft has continued to expand the program. Today, you can use this source code to see how the Windows CE kernel allocates memory, opens files, and creates processes and threads. You can see the exact steps involved in system startup, as well as learn about the inner workings of web servers, message queues, and much, much more. (Why do I feel the sudden need to say that "this offer is not available in any store?... ;-)

===== To Obtain Eval Versions of Platform Builder If you want to get your hands on it, you can download and install an evaluation version of Windows CE 5.0 Platform Builder. During installation, you have to click the option to install the source code and then click the license agreement. After that, you will find the source code in the following location: the \wince500\private subdirectory.

Download (or order a CD) the eval version of PB for CE 5.0 at this URL: https://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/getstart/evaluate/default.aspx

===== Take the Survey - Help Yourself Out For those of you who have used the shared source code, Microsoft wants to hear from you! Nic Sagez, the program manager in charge of the Windows CE source code, has asked me to invite you to participate in a survey. If CE share source has been helpful to you in the past, then you will want to click on the survey link right away and make sure that Nic and his team know about other source code that you might need.

Here is the link for the survey:

https://live.datstat.com/MED-Collector/Survey.ashx?Name=Shared_Source_Survey

On behalf of Nic's team, thank you for taking the survey and helping make the CE shared source programs be the very useful resource that it is.

Best,

Paul Yao

WE-DIG (https://www.we-dig.org/)