During Kevin Dallas’ (General Manager of the Windows Embedded Business) keynote at ESC-Boston yesterday he announced that the official RTM date for Windows Embedded Standard 2011 will be the first half of calendar year 2010.  Which of course means that we need your help now to evaluate and provide feedback on our CTP build that you can download from Microsoft Connect: https://connect.microsoft.com/windowsembedded.  In the three weeks that the CTP has been available we have had fantastic community participation with more than 1500 downloads and more than 30 different forum threads providing feedback and asking questions.  Keep them coming!

In other embedded news yesterday, Kevin made several other announcements:

• Microsoft announced the release to manufacturing of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3 release (read full press release here).  CE 6.0 R3 is the next-generation platform of the componentized, real-time Windows Embedded CE operating system.  The most talked-about new feature of CE 6.0 R3 is Silverlight for Windows Embedded user interface framework which is an out-of-browser, native code implementation of Microsoft Silverlight technology that can be used to create rich and immersive user interfaces for embedded devices.
• RTM of new products in the Windows Embedded Enterprise and Windows Embedded Server product lines: Windows 7 Professional for Embedded Systems; Windows 7 Ultimate for Embedded Systems; Windows Server 2008 R2 for Embedded Systems.  Read full press release here.

- Shayna