Windows Embedded Compact 7 Virtual PC BSP Coming

Microsoft is preparing to release a new board support package for Windows Embedded Compact 7.

Olivier Bloch, Microsoft Embedded technical evangelist announced that early adopters currently testing the next generation of Windows CE will be able to take advantage of the Virtual PC BSP for Windows Embedded Compact 7 soon, although no specific delivery deadline was offered.

The BSP is necessary in order to streamline the way that customers create Embedded Compact 7 images in the context of Microsoft virtualization resources.

“This BSP allows to build a CE image for a virtual machine running in Windows Virtual PC environment (if you are running Windows 7) or Virtual PC 2007 environment (if you are running previous versions of Windows),” Bloch stated.

“A Virtual image disk is provided with the BSP that will boot into the Ethernet Bootloader eboot in order to establish a connection from Visual Studio to download and debug/test a CE image on the virtual machine,” Bloch added.

Early adopters have been able to download the first public Community Technology Preview of Windows Embedded Compact 7 since early June 2010. In fact, at this point in time, the CTP Build for the CTP of Windows CE 6.0’s successor continues to be available for download through Microsoft Connect.

As far as the Virtual PC BSPs go, Microsoft has released similar packages in the past. In fact, some of the customers running Windows Embedded Compact 7’s predecessor might have already taken advantage of the Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Virtual PC 2007 Binary BSP.

“You might have experienced this if you are playing around with this: you are building your OSDesign with the Virtual PC BSP, starting the Virtual Machine that boots into eBoot, establish the connection between Platform Builder and the Virtual Machine, then start the download of your image… when… boom, download fails leaving you with a message about a TFTP timeout error,” Bloch noted.

“This does not happen every time and I couldn’t reproduce it (reason why I don’t have any snapshots), but it seems there is some problem with Windows Virtual PC and the network,” Bloch said.

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