Initially released in 1996, formerly known as Windows CE, the Windows Embedded Compact operating system has been around for almost 2 decades.

Designed to support small footprint device with Real-time capability, Windows Embedded Compact (Compact) is designed to support variety of chipsets, including x86 and ARM.

For a long time, one of the major challenges for Compact developer is that they are not able to use and take advantage of the latest version of Visual Studio, available to support the desktop and server developers.

For the next version of Windows Embedded Compact, schedule to release sometime during Q1 in 2013, developer will be able to use the same Visual Studio 2012 (VS2012) IDE across all Windows platforms, and able to take advantage of the productivity enhancement in VS2012 to support Windows Embedded Compact development, such as:

·         TFS, hosted TFS

·         Code review

·         Agile project management

·         New and improved C++ 11

·         MSBuild for project and build system

·         .NET Compact Framework 3.9 with significant improvement in memory allocation, garbage collection and performance

·         Etc.

To learn more about VS2012 support for the next release of Windows Embedded Compact, watch the follow 6 minutes video from the Visual Studio 2012 launch event, presented by David Campbell (Lead PM for the Windows Embedded Compact team) and Andrew Pardoe (Program manager for the Common Language Runtime team), via the following URL:

http://visualstudiolaunchstaging.social27.com/vs2012vle/Theater?sid=1776