CE 6 doesn't get enough love. It was an amazing OS that had a tiny runtime and a tiny on device foot print (it could get under 16MB iirc).
Too bad the tooling around it was so bad. I should do a writeup of why, it is an interesting case study in how poor extendability of tooling can hurt an entire company.
Part of the reason CE 6 didn't get much love is that everyone had been burned so many times by all the previous CE releases -- not to mention that CE 6 was far too late!
In the end, though, it was better than Mobile, but hindsight is 20/20.
Tl;dr wince team forked visual studio 6 (I think it was 6, I don't recall it was long ago) to make a custom UI and a tool called platform builder.
This was needed because VS didn't have the extensibility needed to do this without source access.
The fork got more and more out of date and it is hard to justify spending resources on an internal tool like that. WinCE was incredible but what was shipped to customers was a tiny sliver of what the OS could really do.
WinCE was also source available, which let it sneak into some really cool places, but the license didn't allow a community to be built up around it. MIT licensed WinCE would have easily gone toe to toe with embedded Linux.
WinCE 6 Platform Builder was based on Visual Studio 2005 I think.
Building applications for WinCE 6 was also only supported with Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, which put a hard cap on available language features and development OS support. I had the thankless job of trying to port C++ code from Linux to WinCE 6 in 2014, and even then VS2008 felt way behind.
CE 6 doesn't get enough love. It was an amazing OS that had a tiny runtime and a tiny on device foot print (it could get under 16MB iirc).
Too bad the tooling around it was so bad. I should do a writeup of why, it is an interesting case study in how poor extendability of tooling can hurt an entire company.
Part of the reason CE 6 didn't get much love is that everyone had been burned so many times by all the previous CE releases -- not to mention that CE 6 was far too late!
In the end, though, it was better than Mobile, but hindsight is 20/20.
I’d be interested in reading that.
Tl;dr wince team forked visual studio 6 (I think it was 6, I don't recall it was long ago) to make a custom UI and a tool called platform builder.
This was needed because VS didn't have the extensibility needed to do this without source access.
The fork got more and more out of date and it is hard to justify spending resources on an internal tool like that. WinCE was incredible but what was shipped to customers was a tiny sliver of what the OS could really do.
WinCE was also source available, which let it sneak into some really cool places, but the license didn't allow a community to be built up around it. MIT licensed WinCE would have easily gone toe to toe with embedded Linux.
WinCE 6 Platform Builder was based on Visual Studio 2005 I think.
Building applications for WinCE 6 was also only supported with Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, which put a hard cap on available language features and development OS support. I had the thankless job of trying to port C++ code from Linux to WinCE 6 in 2014, and even then VS2008 felt way behind.
Ah that's what platform builder was.
I remember at the CE shop we had to copy around a WinXP VM to do the building in, because Platform builder wouldn't install on Win10 or something.