Dr. Dobb's Journal April 1998

Windows CE 1.0 versus Windows CE 2.0

The major differences between Windows CE 1.0 and Windows 2.0 include the following:

Version 1.0 only supported raster fonts. Version 2.0 supports TrueType fonts.
Version 1.0 did not support any of the OLE Win32 API functions (CoInitializeEx, for instance). Version 2.0 supports the OLE API. The Visual C++ Toolkit for CE will also include the Active Template Library for OLE development.
Printing is also new for Version 2.0. However, there is no print manager and there is no spooling of print jobs. Hence, only one application can print at a time. Also, multiple print jobs are not allowed.
Version 1.0 only supports 2 bpp color. Version 2.0 supports 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, and 32 bpp. This covers the same range of support as the other Win32 platforms.
Custom palettes are supported in 2.0.
Support for Java has been announced, although the details remain elusive.

The CE Embedded Toolkit

The CE Embedded Toolkit for Visual C++ 5.0 has been announced to enable embedded developers to customize the CE kernel. This enables a specialized version of CE using a minimum set of software modules to support the platform's requirements (in order to minimize the memory footprint and maximize performance of the operating system).

For example, you could build a version of the OS that contains the kernel and a selected set of communications modules but which does not provide a graphical user interface. In addition, Visual Basic 5.0 and Visual J++ have add-on packages to support CE as one of their target platforms. A Visual Basic run-time interpreter and Java virtual machine are part of these add-on packages.

-- B.R.

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