INTRODUCTION

WINDOWS EMBEDDED Compact 7 (Compact 7) is a 32-bit, small-footprint, hard real-time operating system (OS) with great graphics and multimedia support, developed by Microsoft to support handheld, mobile, automotive, multimedia, retail, medical, industrial, robotics, and other embedded devices. It’s designed to support multiple processor architectures, including ARM, MIPS, and x86.

Windows Embedded Compact development supports subsets of Win32, .NET Framework, and Silverlight and uses the popular Visual Studio integrated development environment to provide a developer-friendly environment to develop embedded applications.

The first version initially released to the public in 1996 as Windows CE; Microsoft subsequently changed the product name to Windows Embedded Compact for the current release. This OS platform has cumulated more than 15 years of continuous development and improvement and evolved to become a mature and robust OS platform. Along with the efficient and developer-friendly environment, Windows Embedded Compact provides the latest networking, multimedia, Silverlight for Windows Embedded, and application development framework that enables the product development team to rapidly develop smart, connected, and service-oriented devices with an exciting and visually compelling user interface.

New Generation of Embedded Devices

During the past three decades, technology has been through a phenomenal growth and is one of the key contributing factors that helped to improve ...

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