CE/XPE - how to choose ?
A question that comes up at every customer meeting is how to choose between Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded – The answer can be pretty simple…
Windows XP Embedded is a componentized version of Windows XP Pro, broken down to approximately 12,000 components, 9,000 device drivers, and 3,000 operating system technologies. Since Windows XP Embedded is a componentized version of Windows XP Pro it only runs on x86 processor and PC architecture hardware, the great thing is that desktop applications and drivers will work with Windows XP Embedded without changes – there are embedded specific technologies added to XP Pro, the ability to run headless, boot from read only media or boot from the network, and resume multiple times from a hibernation file, and device update technologies. Image sizes scale from about 40MB. Windows XP Embedded is not natively real-time, but can be real-time through adding 3rd party real-time extensions.
Windows CE is a small footprint (200KB and up), hard real-time, componentized operating system that runs on x86, MIPS, ARM, and SH4 processor cores – there is no reliance on BIOS or PC architecture hardware. Windows CE exposes approximately 2000 Win32 API’s (compared to the 20,000 API’s exposed on Windows XP Pro) – the operating system is UNICODE based but does support API’s to convert to/from ASCII and Ansi.
As far as application development is concerned Windows XP Embedded runs standard desktop applications, so you could use TurboPascal, Visual Studio, or any or your favorite desktop application (or driver) development tools. Windows CE has two tool choices, eMbedded Visual C++ for ‘native’ code development, and Visual Studio .NET 2003 for ‘Managed’ application development.
Hopefully that gives you the 20,000ft view of the differences between Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded – shout if you have questions…
– Mike