Microsoft confirms more details on Windows for small devices

The development suite that will come with the new XP kernel-based Windows Embedded standard -- which entered beta on Wednesday -- will indeed allow virtual OS instances to run as virtual machines on developers' desktops.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to BetaNews yesterday evening more details about the roadmap the company announced in April concerning future editions of Windows for embedded devices. On Wednesday, the company announced Windows Embedded Standard, which will give small device manufacturers a way to enable Internet Explorer 7 and Terminal Services-based implementations of applications such as the Office suite, implemented on thin handhelds and even the consoles of printers.

But the company's typical "Standard / Professional" nomenclature will not apply this time to other implementations. What is now Windows CE will become "Windows Embedded Compact," and a more feature-rich edition will become "Windows Embedded Enterprise." But as we now know, the company is leaving its options open for additional permutations.

"While Standard does work alone as 'the standard' it conveys a meaning within the context of the other names: Compact and Enterprise," the spokesperson told BetaNews. "And yes, one of the reasons for the new naming is to leave room for additions. Currently there are no plans to add Professional but we do expect the brand to continue to expand to deliver solutions for the embedded market."

The reason for choosing "Standard" as the baseline and building that first, the spokesperson continued, is to distribute the common Windows look and feel as soon as possible, citing a statement from a recent speech by the Embedded team's GM, Kevin Dallas, calling the Standard edition "closest to the standard desktop experience."

The beta program for Embedded Standard 2009 officially began on Wednesday, and availability of the finished product remains slated for later this year. The Enterprise and Compact editions remain scheduled for next year -- still a twelve-month window -- and it's possible we'll see the .NET Micro Framework being spotlighted more heavily with regard to the replacement for Windows CE.

The development environment for ES 2009, as we reported on Wednesday, is unique in that it enables Visual Studio 2008 to network with the device. But as Microsoft's spokesperson told us, the mechanism for that network could very well be a typical local network connection rather than, say, a USB plug. And yes, ES 2009 can run in a virtual machine.

"A developer can connect Visual Studio to a Windows Embedded Standard device over a network connection to debug the device," the spokesperson told us. "Windows Embedded Standard can run in a virtual machine on a Windows desktop. This could be a development and test scenario for the developers, as they can very rapidly test their applications."

The VS edition that comes with ES 2009 will include a multitude of APIs, we're told, that enable developers to write code that control or enable embedded device features remotely. For example, File Based Write Filter (FBWF) is a feature that enables writing of data to an embedded system's storage device on a file-based, rather than sector-based, basis. Those storage devices are protected volumes, and the write process is often more volatile than for the average hard disk, so I/O takes place over a kind of transaction model that looks more like something you'd use for volatile databases than ordinary file systems.

"A developer can write code in Visual Studio," we're told, "to turn on/off FBWF, to query its status, to configure it and so forth."