Why Windows CE Shared Source And Community Projects?

Thursday, 03 August 2006 by Michel Roth

Mike Hall has an article up on why Microsoft ships shared source with Windows CE:

So why does Microsoft ship shared source with Windows CE ? - there are a number of reasons - Windows CE is not like Windows XP/Embedded - for the desktop version of Windows XP (and Windows XP Embedded) the underlying processor architecture and hardware is x86 processor and PC architecture hardware - there isn't a "porting" process to get Windows XP/Embedded running on a new system - the underlying hardware/processor for an XP/Embedded system is consistent across devices - this is clearly the case, take the Windows XP installer that installs the desktop operating system on the wide range of PCs and Laptops that exist today - sure some of the peripherals are different, but the underlying hardware configurating is the same - for Windows XP Embedded tools such as TA(p) [Target Analyzer] can be used to take a snapshot of your taget system hardware configuration and then make it easy to configure/boot a Windows XP Embedded o/s.

Read on here.