Highlights from ESC

I just got back from the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston, and the conference was great this year. I was running some of the labs in the "Build Your Own Embedded System" (BYOES) track this year on Windows Embedded Standard 2011 (Windows 7 Embedded).

The labs went very well and we got great feedback from everyone that attended. I wrote a lot of code for these labs including a Managed wrapper that allows for discovery and control of devices that use the WSDAPI and PnP-X. I did a lot of research while preparing for the show and found that there is no code out there today to do this. I will be posting the code in the coming weeks, so if you are interested, keep an eye open for that.

Besides the work I did on these labs, some of our other engineers were working on an amazing demo for the Kevin Dallas keynote address. It is a webpad style device running a very cool XAML based UI running on Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3 (codenamed Cashmere). We had the device in our booth for the rest of the show and were able to show it to everyone that came by.

Because of the new Silverlight features in R3, a design company was able to create the look and feel for this demo, put together a UI, and provide us the XAML. Once we had this, Nick McCarty (one of our eMVPs) worked with a couple of other engineers to hook up the code-behind to make the demo work. It only took them about a week and a half to get this working.

This ability to seperate the UI design from the code is a great feature that people have been doing on desktop Windows using WPF and Silverlight for quite some time, but now with R3, we can do the same on Windows CE. Very cool.

You can take a look at the keynote on YouTube. Nick's project is shown at 0:22-2:30 in this video. They didn't seem to capture much of the device in the videos they posted, but it should give you an idea.

-Joe