WHAT IS EMBEDDED SOFTWARE?
While software applications for general purpose PCs are designed to function on a broad range of computers, built by different manufacturers that meet general requirements (such as processor speed, available memory, and storage), software developed for the embedded device is intended for one specific model or category of devices.
Comparing to software for general purpose PCs, following are the main differences for embedded software:
- Designed to operate on hardware with limited resources.
- Application codes are tightly coupled with hardware.
- Errors and exceptions can’t be thrown to the user.
Programming Languages and Principles
Other than the different development considerations, which will be explored later in this chapter, similar programming languages and principles apply to developing Windows applications for a desktop PC and embedded applications for a Windows Embedded Compact device.
If you are developing desktop PC applications using Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, you are already familiar with the Visual Studio application development environment for Windows Embedded Compact. With little more effort, you can easily adapt existing Visual Studio experience to develop Windows Embedded Compact applications.
Programming Discipline
When developing applications for a general-purpose desktop PC, you can make the following assumptions about the PC, without considering the end user’s environment in detail:
- It’s equipped with a 1.0 GHz or faster processor. ...
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