Application Development on Windows Embedded Compact 2013

|www.toradex.com Toradex® is a registered trademark of Montadex GmbH 2Mar’16

CHAIRMANWindows Embedded Compact 2013 is the latest

product release in the Microsoft Embedded Compact

family. It was launched in 2013 and will be supported

until 2023, when the end of its life cycle is scheduled.

WEC2013 introduces many new features when compared to Windows Embedded

Compact 7.0 and Windows Embedded CE 6.0. The main change in this version is the

possibility of using VS2012, VS2013, and VS2015 (currently supports only the

native code) as the development environment, which in my opinion is one of the

greatest updates since this allows the developers to use a more modern and

updated IDE. Some of the new features added to the WEC2013 are listed below:

|www.toradex.com Toradex® is a registered trademark of Montadex GmbH 3Mar’16

CHAIRMAN NET Compact Framework 3.9 supporting multicore processors

Integrated with Visual Studio 2012/2013/2015

Performance improvement in the File System

New compiler supporting C ++ 11 (this is the main reason for the

versions 6 & 7 being limited to VS2008)

More information on MSDN

A major advantage of using the new Windows Embedded Compact

2013 is having the .NET Compact 3.9 and this is what we will be testing

in this blog post. The cited blog post shows some of the improvements

made from the previous versions, including multicore support!

|www.toradex.com Toradex® is a registered trademark of Montadex GmbH 4Mar’16

CHAIRMANWhat will you need to reproduce this test? You will need Visual Studio

2013 installed on your computer (Microsoft offers it at:

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/dn469161) and you will also need

Application Builder, an add-on that is provided for free by Microsoft at this

link. Once Application Builder is installed, Visual Studio will offer a

programming option for smart devices. The next step is to install the

Embedded board SDK, either created by you when you built your own OS

or provided by the hardware manufacturer. In my case, I will use a Colibri

iMX6DL 512MB (NXP®/Freescale iMX6DL - ARM CortexTM-A9 and

Windows Embedded Compact 2013 ported by Toradex ).

|www.toradex.com Toradex® is a registered trademark of Montadex GmbH 5Mar’16

CHAIRMANThis Toradex CoM comes with WEC2013 licenses and the OS (production

grade) image included in the hardware price (check the webshop). The OS

images for Toradex modules are available for download on the

developer website. Toradex also offers the WEC2013 SDK for its OS

images, files, and installation instructions which are available at this link.

Once everything is installed, the Windows Embedded Compact option will

appear under the new project menu (see Image 1).

|www.toradex.com Toradex® is a registered trademark of Montadex GmbH 6Mar’16

CHAIRMAN

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CHAIRMANI started a new project using the traditional interface of Visual Studio to

create a new application using Visual C#. On the New Project menu go to:

Visual C# > Windows Embedded Compact > Toradex 800> Device

Application

When you select this option, your project will appear on the screen with the

traditional Visual Studio 2013 interface: a Toolbox to drag objects on the

screen, object properties menu, and other Visual Studio tools (refer Image

2).

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CHAIRMAN

|www.toradex.com Toradex® is a registered trademark of Montadex GmbH 9Mar’16

CHAIRMANHere, I have dragged and dropped several Panel Components to my Form1

and changed their Backcolor property to different colors (see Image 2 Red

arrow). I have also created the Click Method for each of these Panels, into

the code I set the Form background property to the same as the Panel

Background property, this will happen for the Panel_Click method, see the

code below in Image 3.

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CHAIRMAN

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CHAIRMANYou can initialize the debugging process by simply clicking on the Windows

Embedded Compact debugger (yes, the famous play button!) At this point,

some considerable differences between WinCE7 and 2013 may appear. The

notable difference is that debugging cannot be done using the USB

interface, but only through a network connection.

In the video below, you can check out the test running on a display and

being debugged on Visual Studio 2013 at my development host. Note that in

the video I also show another nice feature; I change from the Colibri

iMX6DL to a Colibri VF61.

|www.toradex.com Toradex® is a registered trademark of Montadex GmbH 12Mar’16

CHAIRMANBoth modules are part of the Colibri pin-compatible module family, but while

the first module has a dual-core ARM-A9, the other module has the ARM-A5.

Once WEC2013 is started on the new module, just hit play again and the

application works again on the new module and new processor even though

they feature different cores.

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CHAIRMANToradex solutions are fully scalable as Toradex already takes care of the

differences for you and therefore you can focus your efforts on your

product/application development. This will give you a huge advantage

with time-to-market, cost optimization, and risk management when

developing a new solution for the market.

|www.toradex.com Toradex® is a registered trademark of Montadex GmbH 05/02/2023 14

Thank you!