Windows CE Base Team Blog

Posted by Kurt Kennett Virtual Memory is fantastic. It allows you to create this personalized ‘view’ of the memory space of a computer, and rearrange where things are physically to suit your desires. This is especially good for the organization of...

Posted by Kurt Kennett, Senior Development Lead, Windows CE OS Core Operating system code, as one of my colleague developers recently realized, is “just code”. It’s not voodoo and it does not exist on a higher plane of knowledge. In fact, an operating...

Published by Dave Edson Last year we released a powertoy for the Remote Tools Framework. Now, with the SP1 release, we have released the real product. The Remote Tools Framework allows you to write remote tools (think Remote System Information)...

Posted by: Sue Loh This article explains how memory access and memory passing is implemented in Windows CE 6 as well as previous versions of the OS. My intention is to explain the significant differences in CE6 by contrasting it against earlier OS...

Posted by: Sue Loh Now that WM6 is publicly announced, I want to start taking steps to prevent confusion about one detail that is pretty major to most people who read this blog. Windows Mobile 6 does NOT run the CE 6 OS. Technically the OS version...

Posted by: Dave Edson Hello Everyone... The Microsoft Smart Devices Remote Tools Framework Power Toy 1.0 has been released to the web. Let's call it RTFx for short. It's a framework to make it easier to write remote tools (like Remote Heapwalker...

Description of config.bib, boot.bib, and OEMAdressTable in Windows CE5.0 and 6.0...

Posted by: Sue Loh This list of tools completes what I started with my perf tool list from http://blogs.msdn.com/ce_base/archive/2005/11/30/498782.aspx . Heap Memory Tools Each of these tools works by hooking all of the heap allocation function...

Posted by: Sue Loh It seems that a common need people have is to encrypt all the data on a device, or as much as they can. I've seen some confusion over whether it's possible at all, how to do it, and what's different between WM2003 and WM5. Really...

Posted by: Sue Loh The History If you read our blog regularly then you already know that CeLog is a data logging tool, which provides a lot of interesting system data because we've made the kernel log CeLog events for occurrences like thread switches...

Posted by: Sue Loh This information is something I only personally discovered recently, and it has important implications for our application developer community! For years I thought our "platman" remote tools (Remote Kernel Tracker, Call Profiler...

Posted by: Sue Loh Hello from MEDC! I have enjoyed meeting many of you in person in the last couple of days. :-) In case you missed the news, the service pack for Platform Builder 6.0 is now available as a web download, at http://www.microsoft...

I am told that our APIs are not part of our documentation. :-( I know for sure we documented these, but I'm told there is a documentation update coming soon, so they must only have made it into the update. My apologies on behalf of Microsoft. Keep an...

New sample code called the BSP Template is now available for download. This code serves two major purposes: 1. Provide a stub version of a BSP that illustrates all required and optional BSP functions. 2. Educate newcomers to CE on the basics of...

Some CE-related presentations from ESC Boston are now publicly available. Topics include building a real-time system, the debugger, and the CE build system. You can find the presentations here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/embedded/dd253223.aspx ...

Posted by: Sue Loh I just saw someone on our newsgroups make a recommendation that to get past the Windows CE 32MB per-process VM limitation, you can use shared heaps to make your allocations. I would like to explain some of the pitfalls of choosing...

Posted by: Sue Loh Windows CE APIs are implemented by a set of server processes. Besides the kernel (nk.exe) we have other server processes: filesys.exe, gwes.exe, device.exe, services.exe. When an application calls an API in one of these servers,...

Posted by: Sue Loh This is really a generic topic, not something specific to Windows CE, but I’ve had to explain it to a few people so I thought it would be worth writing up. If you had asked me what virtual memory was several years ago, I’d have given...

Writing large amounts of data to persistent media can take large amounts of time. While Windows CE does have hardware limitations in comparison to the desktop, there are coding practices that will increase your throughput when writing to disk/flash. Higher...

Posted by: Upender Sandadi (reposting since text formatting got messed up first time) This is the second entry in the KITL series. In the first entry we learnt aboust basic KITL packet layout . In this we will look at some of the common things we have...

There have been a few questions posted to the newsgroup over the past few months on the scope the initial setup, and the registry settings of file system filters. I hope to answer some of the most commonly asked questions here. File system filter scope...

Posted by: Sue Loh (with help from Andrew Rogers) I’ve seen this question fly by a few times, so I’m blogging it. “Now that Windows Mobile 5 is persistent store based, how are OEMs supposed to implement a clean boot?” The idea is to reset the registry...

Posted by: Sue Loh What use is a tool if you don't know it's there? One of the problems we have is getting the word out about the tools you can use to debug various kinds of problems. We honestly do try to figure out how to arrange our help documentation...

Posted by: Sue Loh Hello out there, it's been a long time since I posted anything real, and I feel sorry about that. As I began writing this article, I had just come from the first day of TechEd where I saw my colleagues present about CE6 and drivers...

Posted by Jeremy Cooke Both critical sections and mutex objects can be used to synchronize code execution in a Windows CE system. Judicious use of these techniques is necessary to prevent sharing conflicts over system resources through synchronized...