Alexander's Embedded Techwire

the Community Technology Preview is available the Windows Embedded booth. I am on booth duty here.

Anyone, who brings me a coffee gets a DVD. :-)

 

Alexander

Finally arrived in Belin last night. No, I did not make it to the Brandenburg Gate, due to heavy rain and late arrival. Nevertheless, I could hear the fireworks. :-)

Btw. my session on Powershell and WES has been moved to Friday morning, giving me the unique opportunity to give two morning presentations in row.

Therefore, no partying tonight - tech check is tommorrow 8.00 am.

 

Alexander   

Save the date! TechED Europe is getting close. There will be a lot of interesting things at this years top event on Microsoft technologies in Europe.

I am quite happy to be part of it, presenting two sessions: http://www.wechslernet.com/english/Aktuell.htm#TechED_2009

I hope to meet You there. BTW. it coincides withthe 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Quite a few parties are to be expected in the German capital.

 

Alexander 

Just stumbled about this article on taking snapshots for WES 2011 with Hyper-V.

Certainly not the only interesting scenario using this combination.

Just think about some benefits doing deployment.

 

Alexander

It is there!

Go and find out what the newest release is going to look like.

Looks like quite some fun. :-)

 

Alexander

The quite popular Stargate-SG1 TV series produced by MGM has now an onlne virtual tour built with Silverlight.

Photosynth and Expression have been used as tools to build the site.

A good looking result! 

There is a case study with more background information available at the Microsoft web site.

 

Alexander

My fellow MVP and friend Maarten Struys has built some wrappers for the native API to make it available to managed coders.

Check it out at his blog and give him a tap on the shoulder for a job well done.

 

Alexander

Just installed Windows 7 Home Basic on Dell Mini 9 netbook.

Best installation experience of a new Windows System I have ever had! Missing driver were downloaded and installed correctly without any further problems.

This is nice! 

Hey, and what is even better, it seems to run quite faster than the originally installed XP Home!

 

Looks like a great time for Windows users.

Well, I am a PC, anyway...

 

Alexander

Steadily improving.

Have a look at Micosoft's newest cross-platform develepoment technology: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/silverlight/default.aspx

Be sure to run it on a MAC, as well....

 

Alexander

 

Microsoft just announced that Windows 7 will be in the shops end of October. Looking forward to it!

The Release Candidate version already runs more than fine on my PC.

 

Alexander

I am sitting at the gat at Munich Airport while I am writing this. An exiting week of news, technologies, meeting friends as well as new people lies before me. If it happens to be te case that You will be in LA, as well, mae sure You will drop by my session "Using PowerShell on Windows Embedded Standard". It will change Your life! (Well, Alexander modest as always).

Looking forward to be there.......

 

 

Alexander

I am writing this entry directly from Thomas Hemmer's session on IE 8 from the NIK Windows 7 inside event in Nuremberg.

Just delivered my own Windows Deployment talk.

Over 100 people, great content with speakers from Microsoft and partners. Fun to be here.

Get the slides at: www.nik-nbg.de

 

Alexander

It is one of the re-curring things in my Windows CE trainings.

Every time participants export an emulator image together with the SDK this works fine, but the emulator will not boot when the SDK is installed on an application developers machine.

The reson for this is that often KITL is included for debugging puposes when creating the image. Unfortunately this transport is not used by Visual Studio as its debugging transport layer. Visual Studio uses DMA and it seems that both technologies not really work well together (there only can be one, aka Highlander syndrom ).

Therefore, if You want to create an SDK remove KITL from the image configuration and You or respectively the application developer using the SDK will be fine.

 

Alexander

Yes, this is bad and it happens when all devices have the SCCM client included in the image. Meaning that it was cloned together with the image onto the target device. The device ID normally is generated during setup of the client.

Here is a snippet from the SCCM device manager documentation that helps you out:

 

Alternative unique device ID functionality

All currently available consumer Pocket PC devices support a unique hardware ID that the Device Management Agent uses as the SMS unique identifier, and the device management functionality works as designed.

Certain industrial devices do not report a unique device ID, so multiple devices share the SMS unique identifier, rendering the devices individually unmanageable by SMS. The result is that only a single device discovery data record (DDR) appears in the SMS Administrator console, even though multiple devices are successfully communicating with the SMS device management point.

WORKAROUND: Use alternative Device Client registry settings to change DeviceID behavior. To do this, create a registry script or use other means to change two registry keys on the device as follows:

Create this registry value: HKLM\Comm\ApplicationDownload\SimDeviceID with a type DWORD.

Set the value to one of the following (values 1-3 change the behavior of the Device Client Agent):

Value 0 : Default hardware ID functionality
Value 1 : Generate an ID based on a random numbers.
Value 2 : Generate ID from MAC address, if this fails return ID "NO_MAC_ADDR_DEVICE"
Value 3 : Generate ID from MAC address, if this fails generate an ID based on random numbers.

Set this value as a blank string to trigger the Device Client Agent to reset the DeviceID: HKLM\Comm\ApplicationDownload\DeviceID

These steps can be carried our prior to device installation, or subsequent to Device Client Agent installation, even when the Agent is running. If the Agent is running, then the next HTTP request to the device management point will generate a new device ID. The Device Client Agent will set the new device in the ‘DeviceID’ registry value, and not change this value again.

Caution Use of options 2 or 3, blanking of the device ID and subsequent reset of the device might result in the Device Client Agent being unable to acquire a MAC address because device networking components are still initializing. It is recommended that options 2 or 3 are not used in a reset scenario.

 

 

Alexander

 

 

I have done two new Webcasts for MSDN in Germany about Windows EmbeddedStandard 2009 and Device Profile Web Services on .NET MF devices.

Check them out at: http://www.microsoft.com/germany/msdn/webcasts/finder/default.mspx?g=status&o=&s=&presenter=Alexander+Wechsler&webcasttyp=&level=&locale=&technology=&q=

 

Language is German!

 

Alexander