Windows CE 6.0 now in the hands of OEMs

Microsoft’s Mike Hall has blogged the news that the next version of Windows CE, 6.0, has been delivered to the hands of OEMs to begin building devices with the new OS.  There will no doubt be a lag before we start seeing these new devices but this is great news for the Windows CE platform.  Mike provides the following details about this new release:

1. Operating System architecture.
   1. CE 6.0 now supports up to 32k processes with 2GB virtual memory per process (CE 5.0 supported a maximum of 32 processes with 32MB Virtual Memory per process)
   2. Operating system processes moved to kernel space (GWES, Device driver manager, file system manager are all in kernel space - improves performance)
   3. New Kernel mode and user mode driver model (CE 5.0 only supported user mode drivers) - kernel mode drivers for performance, user mode drivers for stability - plus you can now have multiple instances of the user mode driver manager (hey, you have unto 32k processes!)
   4. Strict partitioning of user mode and kernel mode (no SetKMode!)
2. Tools.
   1. The CE 6.0 development tools are integrated with Visual Studio 2005 - this gives you one tool to configure, build, download, debug, and test the operating system and the same tool to write your native (Win32, MFC, ATL, WTL, STL) or managed (C#/VB) applications.
3. Technologies
   1. This item intentionally left blank (ok, so it's not blank, but you get the idea) - more information on supported operating system technologies will be made available at launch.

Comments

[Colin Walker]

I wonder what the approach will be to upgrading existing devices as opposed to releasing new ones build around the new OS.

So far we've not even heard about AKU3.0 upgrades. Perhaps this will be bypassed.