Yesterday everything started to get serious: the 20 embedded invitational finalists were whittled down to just 6. In this behind the scenes piece, we witness the tension, and sometimes the rough edges of students presentations as well as having some fun with our '30 second demos' as the tension builds.
Working with Microsoft folks seems exhausting... Do I need to comment :-)
We have a video crew here with us in Cairo. With them we'll be tracking the highs and lows of all the Embedded finalists as we whittle down the first 20 to the top 3 finalists and the eventual winner. We'll be following the students and the judges, and we'll be taking regular glimpses behind the scenes of the organization. With features like 'Done in 30 seconds' and top tips from the judges, these videos will be 'must watch' for anyone interested in Windows Embedded at the Imagine Cup. Check out Imagine Cup Today: Day One here, where we feature words of wisdom from Embedded Category Captain, Scott Davis, catch a few quick words with our competitors and end with an amazing first day spectacle - the opening ceremony at The Citadel of Saladin in Cairo.
So yesterday was kick off day for Imagine Cup 2009 Egypt. We had the different 
briefings for judges and competitors and then buses picked up every single participant to bring them to the Citadel (see previous post) for the opening ceremony. Prior to the ceremony we were given the opportunity to visit the Mohammad Ali Mosque. You can see on the pictures how amazing this place is on this slide show.
Our embedded judges enjoyed the visit :-)
From left to right: Professor James Hamblen (Georgia Tech), Thierry Joubert (Thierry), Samuel Phung (ICOP Technology).
We then had a really good opening ceremony in a fantastic location: outdoors on top of the Citadel. The speakers were really excellent and enthusiasts! As soon as the video is online I'll edit the post to embed it.
Today is judging time. serious things begin!
So if you are reading Mike Hall's blog you might have seen this picture of me wearing that nice pink ladies hat. well I have proof that I was not the only one!
Dion also put it on his head for some picture. Personally I think it suits him better than me ;-). especially with the Gucci sun glasses.
Imagine Cup kicks off tomorrow with registration, set up, showcase, opening ceremony. Today is more of a setup day where the crew is preparing the rooms. Anil (Program Manager at Microsoft), myself and other MS folks have been roaming around to check on the facilities. The temperature is quite hot here! we are thinking of jumping into the pool!
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we had time to wear our Embedded Development T-shirt too. Check it out on Scott:
Tomorrow serious things are starting.
The Opening Ceremony will take place at the Citadel, built on the highest ground of Cairo (Muqattam hill) by Salah al-Din during the Crossent war, with a great view on Cairo, hosting museums and mosques (including the famous Mohammad Ali Mosque).
I am in Paris airport waiting for my connection to Cairo, having a Perrier and a good croissant!
I will be judging the Embedded Development competition over there. I can't wait to see the projects the finalists will present. So if you don't know much about Imagine Cup , the software "Olympic Games" for students organized by Microsoft, I invite you to visit the Web site: www.imaginecup.com.
There are different competitions within Imagine Cup, and one of them is called Embedded Development. 400 teams (about 1000 individuals) from all around the world signed up for this part of Imagine Cup, creating some innovative project using Windows Embedded technologies to "change the world into a better place". After 2 rounds of selections where the competitors submitted papers and videos of their work, and received hardware to build the devices and embedded system they imagined, 20 teams are invited to Cairo for the finals.
I will be one of the judges they will present their projects too, along with Embedded experts from France, USA, Taiwan, Switzerland, India and Malaysia. The finalists are coming from 20 different countries such as India, Russia, Brasil, Mexico, France, . It will be really interesting to see what kind of ideas they came with. I already had a chance to judge some of the projects for round 2 and I can say that I was really impressed.
I will share what I see daily, so to see and learn more, stay tuned!
So here is something interesting I have been doing and that I wanted to share.
I am working on some labs and I needed to have a Windows Embedded Standard image running in a Virtual machine on top of Hyper-V. I felt like I would have a hard time doing this but at the end of the day it was really easy!
So here are the 3 special steps (sure those who have kids watching Special Agent OSO know what I am talking about with the 3 special steps :-))
Step 1: Create a VHD
First of all I created a new VHD and for this I used this amazing feature of Windows 7 (I am running the Release Candidate on which, by the way, all the Windows Embedded tools, both for CE and WES, are running perfectly well) that enables you to create, mount and boot from VHD files. So it was as easy as opening the Disk Management tool of Windows 7, going to menu Action|Create VHD.
I had to indicate a location for the VHD file, a size, and whether the size is fixed or dynamic.
At this point the VHD was mounted
Next step consisted in initializing the disk (right click on the Disk name in the disk manager):
Once the disk was initialized I could create a new Simple Volume (right click on the disk in disk manager) and format it as I would have done for any other usual hard disk partition. As I wanted to boot an OS from it, I activated the volume.
At this point I had a new volume on my Windows 7 machine ready to host the Windows Embedded Standard OS.
Step 2: Prepare a WES 2009 image.
So 2 options here when you want to build a WES 2009 image for a specific target. First one is to directly go into Target Designer and Component Designer and grab the right components (you can leverage test & dev macro components), and second option is to analyze the target running the target analyzer tool that is provided within Windows Embedded Studio and that runs on Windows, DOS, WinPE. Target Analyzer creates an xml file that lists all the hardware detected on the target which can then be imported into Target Designer in order to select the exact set of drivers required for the target. In my case I went for the first solution and put some components in my OS configuration along with the Virtual PC 2007 Helper macro (this one is usually used to prepare a WES image for Virtual PC 2007 but it works fine for Hyper-V too ;-)).
I checked the dependencies, corrected the few errors, and built the image.
Step 3: deploy the image to Hyper-V.
At this point I had a vhd mounted in my Windows 7 file system (Step 1) and a WES 2009 image in my C:\Windows Embedded Images folder (step 2). I copied the image files into the VHD that is seen as a volume in the file system. Then I detached the VHD in the disk manager of Windows 7:
I then copied the .VHD file to my Hyper-V server, created a new VM, pointed to the new .VHD file and started the virtual machine: after fba, I got my image up and running on Hyper-V
![clip_image002[5]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/obloch/WindowsLiveWriter/RunningWindowsEmbeddedStandardonHyperV_12E5E/clip_image002%5B5%5D_thumb.gif "clip_image002[5]")
Assignment completed!
I am sure I will get a digi medal for this one!
Thanks for your help special agent Oso!
You should check this blog post Mike has been writing about running Windows Embedded CE 6.0 tools on a Windows 64-bit machine, which is something that does NOT work.
Some time ago I posted a video of a demo we got Beckhoff to build for us, showing Real time capabilities and performances of Windows Embedded CE, along with a distributed architecture leveraging Windows Embedded products like Windows Embedded Standard, Windows Embedded Server all discovering and talking to each other using DPWS protocol (Device Profile for Web Services). Here is another video explaining this demo.
Hard Real-Time Demo: Hannover Messe
A brand new Website just went out: the French version of our Windows Embedded portal.
You can access it using this url: www.windowsembedded.fr
Here are the links to all of the localized versions of the site:
China
France
Japan
Korea
Russia
Taiwan
Some English sites also have local specific info:
Australia
India
United Kingdom
An article has been published on the New York Times blog by Saul Hansell covering Kevin Dallas’ keynote at Computex, announcing some of the technologies that will be part of the next release of Windows Embedded CE and explaining what Microsoft’s plans are for the embedded market.
You can find the article here.
Stay tune for more info on these new technologies in the next hour or so on the blog!
I am sure you have been surfing on Flash or Silverlight Websites and you’ve probably been using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) applications on PCs, and while using these applications and Websites, this question came to your mind: “How cool would it be if I could have such user interfaces on my devices!”
Wouldn’t it be great if we could do this for Windows Embedded CE applications user interfaces? Well, this is coming! Kevin Dallas, General Manager of the Windows Embedded Business group, presented a demo at Computex this week showing user interfaces based on a XAML-based rendering engine.
In the very near future you will be able to use this rendering engine on Windows Embedded CE devices.
Today you can achieve something similar on Windows Embedded Standard and Windows Embedded POSReady devices as these products, based on Windows XP Pro bits, allow you to build a customized “Windows” OS for a PC-based device, supporting Silverlight and .Net 3.5, which means you can have devices looking like this kiosk:
Windows Embedded Standard or Windows Embedded POSReady are perfect for PC-based class devices, but if you want to build a portable (battery powered), small footprint, hard real-time device, you will want to use Windows Embedded CE.
So far Windows Embedded CE user interface is developed using win32 GDI, Winforms, .Net Compact Framework and as Mike Hall explains in his blog post, these UI technologies are code driven. This implies that to develop user interface you need to code and designer and developer need to interact to get some nice rich UI done with all the limitations involved (getting developer and designer to speak the same language, to understand each other, having them going back and forth when changes are made to the business logic of the app or on the graphics, or even harder, having the developer to build the crazy animations/effects the designer wants to have…).
So why not get the advantage of the Microsoft Expression tools that allow designers and developers to work together relying on XAML based technologies separating the user experience to the business logic of an application (like Silverlight and WPF do), meaning a developer can focus on coding the business logic, and the designer focuses on the design…
We have recorded this demo so that those of you not at Computex can have a sneak peek into how cool a Windows Embedded CE UI will be, and get explanations from Jeff and Todd on the tools and technologies used. Here is the video:
User Interface Technologies for Windows Embedded CE
Working on demos for future events, Mike and I went through some cool ideas. Here is one you might want to try yourself: a Windows Embedded CE picture frame that reacts to motion: you wave your hand and it changes picture… Mike also describes the development environment he works in to make his life easier: using Virtual PC to host Windows Embedded CE. See the video:
Motion sensor enabled picture frame
Late March, beginning of April we were presenting technical sessions at ESC Silicon Valley.
You can now (at last :-)) find the slides over here.
