Yesterday has been a great day for Microsoft and the Embedded community.
Visual Studio 2012 has been officially launched and it has been confirmed that the next version of Windows Embedded Compact will be fully integrated. It will also include a new version of Microsoft .NET Compact Framework (3.9), with performance improvements and a number of additional features, and will bring support for C++ 11.
On Colin Miller's blog appeared a blog post about Visual Studio Express 2012 for Desktop and its .NET Micro Framework 4.3 support, which will be soon released.
Microsoft also released a new preview of Windows Embedded Standard 8 (WES8 CTP3). It is a componentized version of Windows 8 with additional technologies that extend the power of Windows to specialized devices. This release follows the CTP2 made available in June and delivers lots of quality improvements and several new capabilities:
- Aligned to Windows 8 RTM
- New specialized device templates added to provide easy to use blueprints as a starting point for designing the OS for customer's specialized devices.
- New features and enhancements around lockdown scenarios, including a special servicing mode for devices that use the Unified Write Filter, and a new ability to block and filter USB ports
- Support for more languages: Arabic, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish
- Many quality improvements: restructured catalog, F1 help available in the Image Configuration Editor (ICE) toolkit, improved USB media creation and modules to support common applications.
For more information and download links, check the official Microsoft site.
Last, but not least, Microsoft officially opened the Windows Phone 8 SDK Preview program. If you want to test your Windows Phone 7 application on the Preview release of WP8 SDK and emulators, fill in a short application form on the Microsoft Connect site.
WOW. Lots of news! Stay tuned for updates in the next weeks.