On average I probably show at least once a week how to write a killer application for a Windows Mobile device. Typically this killer app is a typical ‘Hello World’ application, written in C# and running on a Windows Mobile Professional Device. This week things will be different. Even though my best friend during the week will be Visual Studio 2005, I will use it this week to work with Platform Builder, because I am scheduled to teach a Windows Embedded CE 6.0 class. This is definitely a lot of fun to do, especially since we will cover lots of the features of this cool operating system and of the development environment with which to create your own flavor of a Windows Embedded CE 6.0 operating system. This will be a week of talking about components and modules, about operating system architecture, about device driver development and about board support packages. It is also a week with not too much application development, well maybe the good old ‘Hello World’ will still visit me, but definitely not running on a Windows Mobile device as target, but on a real embedded system, as long as I might call the emulator a real embedded system. It seems that more and more people are starting to use Windows Embedded CE 6.0, given the fact that there is enough demand even here in this small country called The Netherlands, to attend this training. As always just before starting a class or a presentation I am wondering how things will go. Is my good old laptop computer keeping up with me? What kind of people will attend this training? Do they have similar experience or is the group very diverse, which makes teaching much more challenging. How will everybody feel about this training at the end of the week? By then they hopefully are even more convinced to start developing their own solution using Windows Embedded CE 6.0. One thing I know for sure already. This week is going to be a lot of fun. Hopefully it is also a week spent well for the students that are attending.   

Maarten Struys