Today I have seen a Microsoft webcast held by Douglas Boling, author of numerous books on Windows CE, and the main topic of the new Windows Embedded Compact 2013, to be released on the market is imminent.

There are a lot of news, especially in terms of performance of the operating system and available development tools. The basis of the system will be Windows CE 8 that has inherited the best of Windows Phone 8 and as always will be "modular" through his extensive catalog.

The improvement in performance is closely linked to the file system that guarantees an increase in the speed of loading applications and a reduced read access time. In addition, it has been introduced its "snapshot boot" that guarantees a boot time very low in the case of cold start.

As far as the development environment, Platform Builder 2013 "hosted" in Visual Studio 2012 with all the improvements arising therefrom; is interesting to observe that it is possible a side-by-side installation with Platform Builder 7.

The development of native applications can make use of the last Microsoft C + + compiler and the new features of C + +11, as well as an updated version of the MFC libraries, STL and ATL. As for the development in managed code, there is the switch  from. Net Compact Framework 3.5 to 3.9 with the introduction of generational Garbage Collector. In addition, the framework assemblies are shared across multiple app domains and not duplicate as it did in previous versions.

Considerable improvements have been made to the development with XAML and networking with full IPv6 support.

We just have to wait for the release and touch all these news!