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Microsoft Sneak Previews CE 6.0

Developers who attended Microsoft`s Mobile & Embedded DevCon conference had a nice surprise waiting for them when Microsoft gave them a sneak preview of its Windows CE 6.0 beta version. The new package is designated to help companies bring more highly differentiated products to market faster and with fewer expenses. Microsoft Windows CE 6.0 won`t be available for consumers before the second half of 2006.

Jason Stolarczyk, marketing manager for Microsoft`s mobile and embedded devices division, explained that CE 6.0 is a response to three specific areas of developer concern: the ability to differentiate their products, development costs, and speed to market. "This product is a direct result of addressing those direct comments," he told Internet News.
The operating system kernel architecture of CE has been redesigned to allow many more processes to run simultaneously -- 32,000, as opposed to just 32 -- each running in a 2GB virtual memory address space.

This last feature allows developers to incorporate larger numbers of more complex applications into more intelligent devices, with a capacity for more multimedia, Web services and wireless networking than before. Stolarczyk noted that the faster speeds afforded by the increased memory "give developers a lot more space to differentiate their devices in the market." The solution also features greater integration between the Virtual Studio 2005 and Platform Builder development tools, which is expected to reduce the time and cost of developing new products.