April 2005 - Posts
Based on feedback received through the blog, I've posted a first stab at an article with a glossary of abbreviations, acronym’s , etc... We'll try to keep it up to date as we introduce new terms or abbreviations so we're not isolating the folks just now
Read More...
Found this press release/article on Arcom’s latest offering of Single Board Computers at WindowsForDevices . The latest boards run from 600MHz Celerons to 2.1GHz Pentium M with the i855 chipset. You can get it with firewire, giganet, CF capable of course,
Read More...
Scoble interviewed Jim Allchin again for Channel 9 this week, this time they talk about TabletPC, WinHEC, Starving musicians, being an executive. Oh yeah, there's some Longhorn stuff in there too. Lots and lots of LH info. - Andy
Read More...
In January we released the Beta version of the new QFE format. “Oh no!” I hear you say, “What do I have to do now to keep my database up to date?”. Well, the reasoning behind the change is to make it easier for customers to keep their Embedded database
Read More...
Here’s a thumbnail pic to a screenshot of Ashampoo’s Uninstaller. This is the screen that shows me the file resources that changed on the system between the two snapshots (pre and post install of the application). You may need to expand the window to
Read More...
Now that we have captured the file and registry changes on an XP-Pro system from installing Winamp Lite, our next step is to get this information ported to Component Designer. In my case, the Ashampoo Uninstaller presents the data in two forms, one through
Read More...
In this post I’ll walk you through the first phases of componentizing an application, in our case we’re doing something easy and starting with Winamp. There are several flavors of Winamp, for simplicity sake I chose “Winamp – Lite”. The version number
Read More...
I'm going to teach you how to componentize third party applications. I'm all about the 'baby steps', so we'll start by setting our sights on something small like Winamp - Lite. We'll document the steps, the trials and tribulations of the process, if I
Read More...
There exists a key under the FBA key (HKLM\System\ CCS\ Control\ WindowsEmbedded\ FBA) called the RegMigrate key. This key can be found in the registry under HKLM\System\FBA\RegMigrate. All the sub keys under this key will be migrated to their corresponding
Read More...
Found this in-depth round up comparison article of USB Flash Drives by Ars Technica via /. They put the following USB Flash devices/Thumbdrives through the paces (weird that they don't have M-Systems ): Apacer Handy Steno HT203 Transcend JetFlash DSC
Read More...
First Boot Agent (FBA) is Embedded's version of XP setup. It performs runtime tasks like PNP enumeration, DLL/COM registration on the target system. FBA is a collection of tasks that are run at specified phase during the setup. These tasks are stored
Read More...
Here are some common networking issues that come up every now and then in XPe runtime. Most networking problems come up due to missing components in the runtime, so here are some quick tips and solutions that should help. How to specify a static ip address
Read More...
In January we released the Beta version of a new QFE format ( Q889402 ). This format was basically a rollup of all previous SP1 security QFEs. For the same month we also released the security QFEs in their previous format ( Q890175 ), with the idea that
Read More...
Same thing I discussed yesterday about the Fonts issue applies to CodePages as well. Click this link to download a zip called “Just_CPs”, use it as a troubleshooting tool when text is not being displayed correctly in your third party apps or control panel
Read More...
If you follow the XPe newsgroup you’ve seen the issue again and again. A company has a custom app or control panel applet they’re componentizing and everything seems fine except for a pesky little issue with the displayed text. Displays fine on Pro, but
Read More...
A new section on the left of the blog has links to the downloads we'll be providing. Called "Download Goodies Here!". - Andy
Read More...
This is for the hobbyists out there. I found an advertisement for CFs through GeekNews . Apparently, NewEgg has 1GB Kingston CF cards for $41.99, Good grief! (Link forwards you to TechBargains.com) Come on now, with cheap gigabyte CF cards, is footprint
Read More...
In case this is your only source of information off of MSDN (yeah right) or you haven't seen the great news, VS 2005 Beta 2 is now available! Go here to get Beta2 . Also, check out Soma's blog entries on the Whidbey announcement and his explanation on
Read More...
"Tips Plans"? Um, whatever; here's an article from TechWeb that tries to decipher some of our comments in yesterday's online chat. Made the internal MS newswire's top headline, good grief. Mike Hall has an additional discussion about it here as well ,
Read More...
#1. In the Help documentation released with XPe SP2 and on the MSDN web page there is a typo in the section called “ Configuring EWF RAM Reg Mode ” that may be causing some confusion. The user is instructed to add a number of registry keys, however one
Read More...
I was just perusing the newsgroups and i see this age old question come up again which was answered by Gordon Smith (another of our superhero eMVPs). Man these MVPs are coming out of the wood work now, god bless 'em! <grin> Basically the Q&A
Read More...
How did you think that title would finish? Anyways, as i mentioned the other day I've got components we use internally for testing and i'll show you some of them, hopefully this will encourage more people to share their component packages with the rest
Read More...
This is just a reminder that there is a "Windows XP Embedded Service Pack 2" chat tomorrow morning, from 10-11a.m (PT) on 4/14/05. Come join the product team in the MSDN Chat room, and send us your questions as we talk about all aspects of XPe SP2. See
Read More...
What's the coolest app or driver package you've componentized? I've done some AntiVirus programs (Kaspersky & FPROT) as proofs of concept before CA released their componentized version of eTrust. Some testers in our lab a couple years ago created
Read More...
Looks like Novell is jumping on the Point of Sale bandwagon with a new offering, it's called Novell Linux Point of Service 9. If I'm reading the press release correctly it appears they're leveraging SUSE Enterprise Manager on the backend part of a package
Read More...
If you’ve ever created a component in Component Designer you may have seen in the Advanced properties that there are two identifiers for the component, a VIGUID and a VSGUID. Most people are familiar with the concept of a GUID being a unique identifier
Read More...
This question came up in the Embedded newsgroup a while back, and since then I've been interested in finding the answer. Here's the scenario: Say you have a number of computers that you want to boot from CD (via El Torito), and all of these computers
Read More...
David Berlind is an editor at ZDNET (links to his blog) and he’s posted a podcast interview of one of our XPe customers as part of David’s ‘IT Matters’ series. The podcast is a 20+ minute Q&A with Miles Wade and it’s provided me with a perspective
Read More...
As you're probably aware there's lots of goodness going into Longhorn , it's far from being a minor upgrade over XP. While we wait for the LH Beta I'll whet your appetite for information by pointing out some publicly discussed items that may seem intuitive
Read More...
Stephen Shankland over at CNET has good article/interview, this one on “ Wind River’s Linux transformation ”. He interviews the relatively new CEO of Wind River Ken Klein. Ken appears to be saying the right things to try to get his company back on track
Read More...
Check out VIA’s latest form factor – ‘ Luke ’ - with the latest Via Eden proc. This is apparently even smaller than the nano-ITX form factor, the miniaturization process is now taking them beyond board-level to silicon-level innovation. Of course it has
Read More...
Are you visiting Seattle for the WinHEC conference April 25-27? Are you an XPe customer, partner or eMVP and interested in meeting with the product team outside of WinHEC one night? If you answer yes to both of those, let’s get together when you’re in
Read More...
I stumbled on this cool article/interview by John Dodge at EDN about the GE (GE Transportation) and the Electro-Motive Division unit of GM (General Motors) locomotives being pulled into the digital age with more sophisticated computer monitoring systems
Read More...
Is your life as an Embedded developer truly better off with a thousand windows feature components and 9,000 driver components? In NT4 Embedded there were about 250 components. With XP Embedded we gave you 10,000. Immediately after shipping the product
Read More...
[edit 4/2/04. In case you're a day late or viewing this through Google/MSN cache, this was an April Fool's prank] Windows Embedded and Apple team up to componentize MAC OS X . WindRiver cries foul! You probably saw the announcement already but in case
Read More...