Windows CE Base Team Blog

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...

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 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 Travis Hobrla (thanks to Sue Loh who assisted with many portions of this article) Introduction Debug messages are an excellent supplement to a debugger. They give information about the system’s state, warn about potential failures, and assist...

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 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 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: Upender Sandadi One of the goals for Windows CE 6.0 design was full backward compatibility at the binary level for ISV applications. We have gone to great lengths to maintain binary level compatibility by: a) Maintaining the same exports...

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...

Posted by: Upender Sandadi Overview of KITL KITL, which stands for Kernel Independent Transport Layer, is the basic debugging protocol used for debugging Windows CE devices. The KITL layer on the desktop and device manage both the transport and...

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...

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

Posted by: Sue Loh Note: Big thanks to Jonathan Lyons who is the true author of most of this post! Italics are my writing, the rest is his. Jonathan is a program manager on the Windows CE tools team, and the speaker for the “Windows Embedded CE 6.0...

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 I’d like to explain a little more about memory management in Windows CE. I already explained a bit about paging in Windows CE when I discussed virtual memory . In short, the OS will delay committing memory as long as possible by...

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 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...

Posted by: Sue Loh I attempted to document this behavior in the file that has become http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/wcedata5/html/wce50conUpgradingtheHiveBasedRegistry.asp . It is not very discoverable information though, I fear. And some...

Posted by: Sue Loh One of the biggest concerns people have about the new CE6 release is backward compatibility. Every release we try very hard to make existing applications, drivers and OALs as compatible as possible. With CE6 we expect very high compatibility...

Posted by: Sue Loh This material is drawn from a talk that Travis Hobrla gave at MEDC 2006 (thanks Travis!) and contributed to by the whole Windows CE BSP team. The driver changes that I have already written about the biggest CE6 differences that...

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 I've talked about this before but I want to really highlight it because I still see people wrestling with it. In Windows CE 5.0 and earlier, "kernel mode" is an access level attached to a thread. If a thread is "in kernel mode...

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 Today I was describing what "warm boot," "cold boot," and "clean boot" mean to someone, and it turned out that it was a more complicated topic to understand than I had realized. So I figured I should share it. Luckily that "someone...

Hello my Name is Nachiket Acharya and today I am going to talk about usefulness of an SDK and use it to create applications for the SDK. Brent Bishop has posted an article on this site for Automating the Creation of an OS Design Project and Modifying...