[Simh] SIMH on Windows CE

[Ian King]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Stevens [mailto:neozeed at gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 9:30 AM
> To: Gregg Levine
> Cc: simh at trailing-edge.com; Ian King
> Subject: Re: [Simh] SIMH on Windows CE
> 
> The MS pages really vary wildly in quality, the 'tech' stuff seems to
> miss major details, and the blog stuff seems include major details in
> passing...
> 
> Luckily for me this site, hpcfactor (http://www.hpcfactor.com/) has a
> lot of the old VC toolkits for CE.. which has been a massive help.  I
> just hate how MS pretends old products never existed... But at the
> same time, I'm kind of liking the setup... I must be weird, I guess.
> 

You think MS is bad?  Try HP....

I was the test manager for the Windows CE core in the 4.2 and 5.0 days.  Even between those two releases there were breaking changes that typically required app code changes.  No, it wasn't signed packages or anything like that, just lots of API changes.  That was also the early days of the .Net Compact Framework as it was called, so "managed code" was just coming into vogue as 5.0 was shipping.  

Since then, they've completely restructured the kernel - essentially "NT Lite."  I have no idea how that impacted product development in the environment (I left Microsoft in 2008).  But it can't be good.  :-)  

There was also a lot of confusion and conflict as to the purpose of CE.  By the 5.0 timeframe, the "smart phone" folks thought they were the only customer and all development should focus on making them happy (even though they had not a clue just what they wanted or needed).  Sad, really: there were a lot of folks who worked hard to make a good embedded (soft) real-time OS that was subsequently hacked into a series of geeky toys that existed primarily to sell more copies of Windows.