I think it may surprise a lot of people in the industry that Microsoft (and most high visibility software vendors) invests a lot of time and effort into their testing. Quality assurance is so key to the success of our products that every team in the company has personnel whose lives are dedicated to just insuring that quality is in the product. We can debate the success or failure of this effort, from...

The Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line tool is not completely localized because the file CLIEGALI.MFL for the appropriate MUI language is not brought into the runtime when it is built in Target Designer. This is the file that defines the localized WMI namespace root\cli\MS_xxx, where xxx is the LCID for a language (e.g. 411 for Japanese). This file, for every language, does exist in the...

Note: The content in this blog is for users who are familiar with using Image Configuration Editor (ICE) to create a fully resolved answer file. If you would like to learn how to create a fully resolved answer file, please refer to this blog article . ICE provides easy ways to add custom files to your Windows Embedded Standard 2011 image and generate a bootable IBW Disk. This blog article explains...

If you haven’t had a chance to read through Robert’s blogs on Image Based Wizard ( Part 1 , Part 2 ) introduced in Windows Embedded Standard 2011, here is a short cut - I quickly interviewed Robert the other day. He talked about what IBW is designed for, what the key functionalities are and how to use it, etc. The video is about 9 minutes long, with the last few minutes where Robert demos an end-to...

There have been several forum posts about including the redistributable files for Visual studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008 in a runtime image so that applications built using these versions can run. Windows Embedded Standard 2009 database does not have componentized versions of the redistributable files for these versions of VS. The easiest way is to include the redist files as part of the application...

In this blog article I will be talking about a new security feature in Windows Embedded Standard 2011 (“Quebec”). This security feature has been part of Windows Operating System since Vista timeframe. I will touch upon the usefulness of this feature. The main idea of this article is to go over the procedure of adding this package to your image and using it afterwards. BitLocker in Windows Embedded...

This is a reminder that on Monday, Oct 19 the third technical webinar in our series on Windows Embedded Standard 2011 will be held. The details are: Date: October 19, 2009 Event Start Time: 11:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time (UTC - 7 hours) Duration: 1 hour Join this one hour webinar to experience servicing in Windows Embedded Standard 2011. During this session you will learn how Windows Embedded Standard...

One of the nice features of Windows Embedded Standard 2011is that we have the same drivers available as Windows 7. That means that we have a wide range of drivers available (500+), and the drivers have gone through extensive testing with the Windows team. For Windows Embedded Standard 2011 we want to give our customers the flexibility to set up their runtimes with the drivers they want. To accomplish...

In certain instances you may not want the embedded device system to beep when an event occurs or those associated with message boxes popped up by the system or user applications. In these cases you can add a registry key to suppress this beep, namely: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Sound\ Beep REG_SZ Value=yes ExtendedSounds REG_SZ Value=yes This registry key was not originally included...

PLEASE NOTE: The settings described in this article apply to Windows Embedded Standard 2011 CTP. The required settings may change slightly for the release to manufacturing (RTM) version of Windows Embedded Standard 2011, but for the most part the approach outlined in this article should apply to the RTM release. One very common scenario for users of Windows Embedded Standard 2011 is to develop a...

In Windows Embedded Standard 2011, the Distribution share (DS) is a critical element in creating customized Windows images. If you have used Image Configuration Editor (ICE), you would have noticed that packages are well organized into a tree structure that represents the DS. During development, users might need to use other packages in addition to the ones already found in the DS. Examples include...

As PC users & developers, we are faced with situations where we want to save the current state of the operating system along with its applications. One such situation is when developers have to reproduce a bug in the system/application that is hard to recreate or that occurs only occasionally. The Snapshot feature in Hyper-V is a developer’s dream in this regard- capable of saving the current state...