Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft is holding a Virtual Launch Event tomorrow for Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 which adds a variety of useful minor enhancements including new VOIP support to CE 6.0 which launched slightly more than a year ago. If this seems a little dry, recall that Windows Embedded CE is the foundation upon which Microsoft’s Windows Mobile phone operating system is built, and CE 6 will be the basis for the next release of Windows Mobile codenamed Photon.

In other Windows Mobile news, Microsoft spinoff ZenZui (soon to be renamed Zumobi) announced an open beta of their mobile phone Web browsing service/interface for Windows Mobile phones.

Update: The official announcement press release says Microsoft is increasing their spending on Windows Embedded by 33% this year to US $75 million.

Microsoft today announced a partnership with Siemens VDO to jointly develop entertainment and automobile systems for the automobile market:

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Microsoft today launched Robotics Studio 1.5 adding support for Windows Embedded CE 6.0 and Windows Mobile 6, “which allows developers to more easily deploy advanced scenarios and software applications on embedded platforms of a wider variety and lower cost.” Among other enhancements were:

… improvements to its visual programming language and 3-D real-world-physics-based visual simulation environment, built on the AGEIA Technologies Inc.-based PhysX engine. New services have also been added, including support for vision and speech recognition, expanded documentation and a new editor that makes it easier to configure and target software services for robotics platforms.

Robotics Studio 1.5 is free and available for download here. A variety of marketing programs were announced as well.

This week Microsoft is hosting a Small Business Summit and the publicity is mostly a rehash of past announcements with a small business spin. However, there was some surprising new news - Microsoft Unveils Small-Business Phone System Software Designed for Ease of Use:

Today at the second annual Microsoft Small Business Summit, Microsoft Corp. unveiled a small-business Internet protocol (IP) phone system, code-named “Response Point,” designed for ease of use and manageability. The new system comes in an easy-to-install box, supports both voice over IP (VoIP) and traditional phone lines, and includes a voice-activated user interface.

Now in beta testing, “Response Point” will be generally available later this year in three models: D-Link DVX-2000, Quanta Syspine and Uniden Evolo. “I am proud and honored to work with leaders in the computing, telephony and networking fields to bring ‘Response Point’ to market,” said Xuedong Huang, general manager of the “Response Point” team at Microsoft. “Each of our OEM partners brings its own special expertise to our customers, allowing us to serve a much broader range of small businesses.”

OK, so Microsoft is just doing the software and D-Link, Quanta, and Uniden are the OEMs, but that’s a familiar model isn’t it? Aside from the novelty of Microsoft entering the business phone system market, the voice interface is something different:

Phone calls on the system are designed to be easy to make by pressing the “Response Point” button on the phone and telling the system who you want to call. For example, a user could say “Call Jeff at work,” and the system will dial that number based on the contact information entered into the Response Point directory, Smith said.

Response Point can be set up either as a VoIP system or one that uses traditional phone lines, he added.

The systems are intended to be easy to set up, also appealing to small businesses, but there’s also another novel facet of Response Point:

The team that built the Response Point system acted as an independently funded startup within Microsoft, which gave it the advantage of developing the product “from the ground up” for small businesses without having to work with other product teams, Smith said.

In addition, the team operated like a small startup company, allowing it to understand the needs of small businesses, said Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman, speaking on the video at the summit. “What they found is that what small businesses need is the ability to simplify the steps it takes to accomplish every day tasks,” he said. One example of how Response Point addresses that is the speech recognition feature, he said.

Aside from Steve Ballmer possibly considering this insane, one can’t help but wonder if this kind of “skunk works” is the hallmark of an organization grown too large. Remember IBM and how they had to develop the IBM PC?

In any case, the Response Point Home Page has more details.

As the number of programmable device form factors proliferates, so does programming tooling and Microsoft today released the software development kit (SDK) for its entry in the small device market, the .NET Micro Framework:

Today at Embedded World 2007, Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of the software development kit (SDK) for the Microsoft® .NET Micro Framework. With its ability to work seamlessly with Visual Studio®, the .NET Micro Framework extends the power of Microsoft’s embedded offerings into the realm of smaller, less expensive and more resource-constrained devices.
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“The .NET Micro Framework was built from the ground up as a .NET solution for small embedded devices,” said Colin Miller, director of the .NET Micro Framework at Microsoft. “It brings the reliability and efficiency of the .NET environment to a new set of applications such as home automation systems, industrial sensors, retail displays and healthcare monitors. Development on this platform works seamlessly with the same tools that are used throughout the Microsoft family of platforms. This decreases the distinction between embedded application development and other application development tasks and helps reduce the cost and risks of these projects.”
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The .NET Micro Framework SDK enables developers to take full advantage of the C# development language and the rich development and debugging experience that Visual Studio provides. In addition, the SDK offers user-extensible hardware emulation and seamless, graphical debugging of emulated and real hardware to deliver robust solutions in less time than ever before.

The .NET Micro Framework SDK not only works seamlessly with Visual Studio and offers an extensible emulator, but is also supported by a number of hardware platforms based on the ARM7 and ARM9 processor cores. The framework also enables device developers to connect these hardware platforms to virtually any peripheral hardware through industry-standard communication connections and custom-managed drivers.

Those interested in receiving a copy of the SDK for the .NET Micro Framework can visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/netmf.

Partner support was also announced. Conceptually, the .NET Micro Framework is for devices insufficiently powerful or expensive to warrant Windows CE and which apparently have been attracting Linux development. The licensing fee for the .NET Micro Framework is reportedly $1 to $2 per device in volume.