My apologies for not posting yesterday, had some issue with my system. In this article I will be talking about the basic OS design.

Step 2: From the IDE select the new project option.

Now usually Platform Builder for CE 6.0 is selected by default. In case it is not selected by default, select Platform Builder for CE 6.0. Choose an appropriate name for your project and click OK. Make sure the create directory for solution is clicked. By default your OS design will get stored in the following path “C:\WINCE600\OSDesigns”, is a good practice to leave it in its default setting however if you wish to change it you can.

Step 4:After you click OK a new window pops up, this is the Windows Embedded CE 6.0 OS Design Wizard.

Click Next.

Step 4: At this stage we are required to select the required Board Support Package to create a runtime image for your device. Here we can see that ICOP_eBox4300_60CS:X86 is selected.For developing an image using 2300, you should select the highlighted BSP, (i.e.,ICOP_Vortex86_60CS:86). Thus, you can install multiple BSP’s and use different development platforms using the same IDE with similar settings. After selecting the required BSP click NEXT and the wizard will take us to the next step.

Step 5: In this step we select a design template to start our OS design. Platform Builder provides various design templates to choose from. For our example we shall use the industrial device template.

Now click NEXT to proceed to the next step. Before you move onto writing applications on CE, I would suggest that you try to make an OS with with dfferent design templates, this is a good way of knowing what components are included in different design templates. The details on these different templates included in Platform Builder can be found in Mr. Samuel Phung’s book Professional Windows Embedded CE 6.0 (pp. 65-66). Link to Mr. Samuel Phung's book

Step 7: In this step we select the design template variant, for our example we will use Internet Appliance variant.

Click NEXT to proceed. For each OS design template the OS design wizard provides more than one variant to choose from. Each variant includes different functionality to the runtime image. So , again we are at a point where we have different options to choose from, my suggestion is try out different variations this gives a better idea of what different variants are capable of doing. This will help you in choosing the correct template and variant for your application development.

Step 7: In this step we select the Application and Media components. These components are needed to include the supporting files and libraries required to use various applications and media devices.

For our development at this stage we shall use the default settings (i.e., we will not choose any component or remove any component from this window and simply click FINISH to proceed). The reason I am going with the default settings is that in my 4th blog entry I will be talking about the Hello World application and default settings are what we need for that to work. If any of the components as shown in the Figure above are not selected on your screen please make sure to include them.

Step 8: In this step we can choose to include Networking and Communication components to include with the image. However for our current example we will leave it at its default setting.

Take of note of this particular window, for now we will stick with the default settings because we will not be developing any application that uses a network interface, but I will be writing about the network interface later and this window will come into play there.

Click FINISH to complete the OS design process. Completion of this step does not mean that the OS is ready for use. We need to further customize it by adding more components. After the above steps are completed you will receive a Catalog Item Notification. This warning is just given to inform you that the OS design includes one or more components that may pose a security threat.

Click Acknowledge to proceed.

After this I will write about customization of the OS design in my next blog entry, this might not sound very nice thing to do but it will give the beginners a chance to find out what components are available for customization after the design wizard is complete.

Thank you