Win CE 7应用程序开发

Question

I have requirement that we need to develop a rich UI application(similar to WPF or silverlight). The target device is having embedded OS Win CE 7. how can i achieve this, after so much R&D i got to know that

1. we have to user Silverlight for GUI and C++ as backend coding
2. we can create the MFC application using some third party SDK we will not be able to get rich UI

Also, i read that we can add components in WIN CE 7 for compact framework.

Is my above understanding correct, can someone throw some light on this?

Answer 1

Just to add my 2 cents to Chris and Paolo's replies, if you are not building the OS image for the target device or, at least, can't control the features it supports, your choice may be limited by the set of components that were included into the OS image provided with the device. Windows CE is highly componentized and both the badly named "Silverlight for Windows Embedded" (XAML) and .NET Compact Framewor runtimes can be left out of the OS image to save storage space and memory. The XAML runtime can leverage graphic acceleration (if the HW you are using provides it and the BSP includes drivers to use it, of course) and this may lead to a more responsive system, compared to a full .NET implementation. I would also try to stay away from MFC for new implementation. The only good reason to use MFC is that you already have an UI framework that fit your needs and is based on it. Currently on CE you can decide between an easy to design and rich UI with complex to develop and debug code-behind (XAML) or an easy to develop .NET application with an ugly windows 95-like UI that require lot of work to be "beautified". XAML in the hand may merge the best of both worlds (requiring additional cost and two heavvy runtimes on your target, but this may not be an issue if you have a powerful x86 machine or a graphic accelerated ARM Cortex).

Answer 2

To develop application on WEC 7 you need an SDK built from OEM that give you the target board. If you want to develop on a Virtual PC image you need Platform Builder to use CEPC BSP and create an OS image and the corresponding SDK.

After that, you can develop using Silverlight only with C++ but you can use .Net Compact Framework and managed code for Windows Forms development.

Paolo.

Answer 3

It really, really depends on both your definition of "rich" and the graphics capability of the hardware you're targeting.

CE 7 supports the .NET Compact Framework. Many people will say that you can't do "rich" UI in the CF, but that's not really true. You can't do it with the standard controls, but if you do your own custom control drawing, you can do pretty well. Yet, it's a lot of work, but it can be done. The limitations here are in alphablending (not fun to get working) and animation (also not fun), but with dedication you can work around many issues.

CE 7.0 also supports "Silverlight for Windows Embedded" (aka SWE). First thing to know there is that it's really not Silverlight. It's a XAML rendering engine, but any other Silverlight assets you might have won't work with it.

SWE supports only C++, though since it is COM based, it can be wrapped in CF classes and then used from managed code. I've seen a couple of companies do this, and one even offers it as a product .

MFC is available, but since MFC was crap even 10 years ago, I definitely wouldn't use it today. If you want to use C++ but not SWE, there are better options than MFC. STL and WTL come to mind for windowing apps.