Cheat Sheet: Windows Embedded Standard 7
What is it?: It’s Windows 7 sliced and diced and, indeed, a little spiced up for use in embedded devices
And it differs from Windows 7 how, exactly?: It’s componentized, so it’s smaller and can be booted from a solid state device. It has “embedded enabling features”, plus its own tools to create and deploy an image.
Why is it significant?: Since Standard 7 is based on Windows 7, this means that all the sexy UI features of the desktop are coming to an embedded device near you soon – whether it be a kiosk, an ATM, an industrial controller, a mixing desk or whatever. So that’s multi-touch and gesture based GUI, Windows Media Player 12, Silverlight 3, Aero and all the rest of it.
What hardware does it run on?: Like Windows 7, any x86, including 64-bit, that is suitably capable (min 512MB RAM, 1GHz x86). The interesting possibilities in embedded are Atom (and Moorestown etc. beyond) for handheld-ish devices, and big multicore devices which can do the heavy lifting that some industrial or signal processing apps need.
What do you mean by “smaller”?: We’re seeing typical image sizes from 1 – 3GB. That compares with 16GB for Windows 7, and 300-500MB for Standard 2009. Not quite as small as the best-case figures that Microsoft is giving out, but small enough for the job.
“Embedded Enabling Features???”: There’s HORM (Hibernate Once Resume Many) so that you can speed up boot by resuming from a known good image, giving an “on time” of 10-15 seconds, write filters so that you can constrain the ability of apps to overwrite the image, USB Boot, Custom shell – because it’s not supposed to be a PC and need not look like one, and other stuff – look at the Windows Embedded Standard 7 webpage.
Any more interesting features?: Well, think of Windows 7, and all those features are there. AppLocker is particularly promising for embedded use as you can secure your device by explicitly controlling what applications can be executed. Deployment of updates is very slick – you can even update live systems.
What about the tools?: The old tools associated with XPe and Windows Embedded Standard 2009 have disappeared to be replaced by IGW (Image Generator Wizard) – a quick and easy way to create an image, and ICE (Image Configuration Editor) which gives you full control. There are now two ways to get the tools, you can buy a toolkit (and there is still a 180-day free evaluation which does everything up to the point of deployment/licensing), or you can get an MSDN Embedded Subscription which gives you all embedded toolkits (XPe, Standard 2009, Standard 7, CE 6.0,, CE future. Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010 – basically everything that has been and everything that comes up in the next 12 months), plus the advantage of “developer updates” so that, as with the desktop, you get to see and download all the patches and upgrades as they arrive.
When is it available?: Right now, the product is announced, and the 180-day evaluation toolkit is available to download. Later this month (May 2010) pricing of the two versions of the product will be announced. From June, full toolkits will be available (including via MSDN Subscription), and you’ll be able to buy licences.
That’s all for now. I’ll blog about the different versions of Standard 7 later this week…