Third day,...

Today me and Mathias started out quite embedded with "BSP and Drivers for CE6". It was quite interesting and a bit more hands on what you need to do to get CE6 running on your hardware. It went through the BSP and all the things you need to do there. Quite interesting!

Then we took a deep dive into the CE6 build process in the lecture "All you ever wanted to know about Its Build Process". Also quite interesting to get to see what this whole ~12000 files large build tree really consists of and where to find things, and how to optimize build and build time. A lot has been done here between CE5 and CE6.

I also attended once session to rellay get a grip on what Expression Blend is, and what you can do in Blend and Visual Studio respectively. The idea of dividing the work between designers and developers sounds great!

A quick lunch and then we all attended a lunch seminar called "Introduction to XNA Game Studio" which is MS environment for developing games. The games can be run on either your PC, your XBOX and now also, beware, on a Zune! Quite cool to see the possibilities here, and that you can create one game and with extremely small changes make it run on all three platforms!

I then dived into "Peer-to-Peer Windows Mobile Software" and got a bunch of info about the bluetooth stacks on WM. The author also had written a quite interesting bluetooth lib which he gave us. With the lib you can easily develop bluetooth applications towards the Microsoft stack. He finished off his lecture by creating a mesh network of WM devices and had a multi peer chat running over that mesh network! Totally cool!

The afternoon continued with "Choosing the right API for your Embedded CE6 application" where a real nerd :o) created a "photo frame" application in both C++/Win32 and .NET managed code too see the differences and various aspects of both approaches. I talked about him regarding test boards for WM afterwards and he had some good tips. The one he ran on could run both CE, XP and beware, Vista embedded. :o)

Then I did a hands on lab for .NET Micro where I got to program .NET code and download that to a small hardware board and see the results of my button presses on a small "alarm panel thingy" on a small text based display.

After this it was time for the attendee party at Universal Studios. Quite fun to walk around a theme park and everything is free! Even the beer! ;o)