Saturday, June 27, 2009

Embedded Technology Workshop

Some members of our team, including myself, have attended a small, half-day workshop on Microsoft Embedded Technologies. Here's how the agenda looked like:










TIMETOPIC
12:30Registration and light lunch
13:00 – 13:05Welcome speech
13:10 – 13:30Introduction: Why use Embedded? What are the benefits?
13:30 to 15:00Module 1: Windows Embedded Standard – Development Suite, Tools and Utilities.

Module 2: Embedded Enabling Features.
15:00Tea/Coffee Break
14:30 to 16:00Module 3: Demo:
- Building an image using File Based Write Filter
Module 4: Componentization of 3rd Party Drivers.

Module 5: Demo:
- Creating Custom Components in your image.
16:00 - 16:30Q & A
16:30Closing and thank you

It was held at the local Microsoft office (not Microsoft Office, but the actual place where like, people work). The office was pretty boring by the way - no huge Bill Gates portaits, no sacrifices etc ... maybe they clean up when they know strangers will be present.

Anyway, the topic was mostly about how to assemble your own embedded OS from parts of dismembered Windows XP or Windows Embedded Standard etc. Basically, if I know exactly what peripherial devices will my hardware use, I can only include drivers for these devices, hugely reducing the size of the OS. Also, I may choose to cut out other elements of the OS - I may get rid of the whole explorer shell altogether. They mentioned that the smallest OS they have actually seen used by one of the clients was about 8MB in size. Quite impressive compared to the standard XP footprint of about 1.9GB.

As they said, the goal of the workshop was to show the participants that the process of assembling your own OS is not as complicated as people usually think. Can't say they succeeded - looked fairly complex to me so far ...

P.S. I have no idea why blogger inserts so many empty lines before the table ... will try to fix it later.

by . Also posted on my website

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