April Fools? "Build a smart coffee mug, build a talking bear, build a robot, or build something else entirely"

and no validation (client nor server) on the form...?

And a different domain name (rather than using a page on microsoft.com)?

My spidey sense is tingling.

EDIT: It's down. In case people were curious: http://i.imgur.com/9zUIPSf.png

Links from the "More on:" section:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/quark/inte...

http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-exp...

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/windows-embed...

http://makerfaire.com/

Running WHOIS shows that the domain is registered to MarkMonitor (which Microsoft uses for domain registration) and uses the same nameservers as microsoft.com and windows.com.

Might be part of this?

http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-staffs-up-its-evolving-intern...

I think more will be known tomorrow as tomorrow is Microsofts' "//Build/" conference.

This is one of the presentations titled "Windows and the Internet of Things" - http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-511

And possibly this session? http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-536

Anyway, it looks like the site has been pulled (for now), as it's showing that the site is no longer available.

Down the bottom left of the page it mentions: "[...]fun projects such as the life-size piano we demonstrated at Build 2014."

Yup, looks like this is a real thing and will show up soon as part of a //Build/ conference.

I suspect its down due to going past some Azure bandwidth limit

I know many older people that did electronics back in the day. They have solar cells on their roofs now, they want to do something with them, ie. measure output, plot graphs etc. I'm an RPi enthusiast and always point them to my blog and talk about the RPi. It's always the Linux that puts them off. They feel it's complicated, messes up easily. I'm pretty sure there is quite a market out there for these boards.

Why? Honestly, I can't think of any good reason to use Windows in an embedded device of any kind.

Have them use an Arduino or something with a nice older-person-friendly IDE and run a serial line to their windows box or something.

I find myself increasingly not using my Arduino stuff, the problem is I want to use it for complex things, and it just isn't as much fun.

My weapon of choice, 10 years ago was always a PIC micro, I prefered them to the Atmel, and I'd mostly write in MASM using my own IDE that provided some useful additions to the macros I normally used (branch highlighting etc).

This was great for hobby stuff, stuff only I'm working on. I know precisely how long an instruction or macro will take, I can make really accurate timings. Great! I even got an In Circuit Debugger.

I can't really drop down to that stuff on an Arduino, so I'll end up with a few PICs for doing the signals interfacing stuff, ok that's fine. But that means I'm normally wanting more of the 'intelligent' uC.

Which is why I like my .Net Fez board. It's great for hobbiests, whilst the TinyCLR is frustratingly behind .Net, it's still better than Java in many ways.

However, I look at the price of that, and I look at a mobile phone. I can happily talk to a PIC via the audio jack for most things. I've got a brilliant touch screen, controller, wifi and enough memory to run complex things written in a high level language. It even has a battery too.

Which is why I can't help but feel there is a missing trick with hobby micro electronics at the moment, more effort should be around re-purposing the ultra cheap hardware that is a mobile phone.

Backed. Event loop driven uC programming is a lot easier than working with an OS for very simple things. They even make pretty decent wifi modules that let you can interface with over UART. It would make measuring and dialing home with results easy for a one off.

You can even program microcontrollers visually: http://microflo.org/

http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/full-stack-fbp/

The form doesn't actually submit, it just redirects:

$(document).ready(function () {$('.signup-button').click(function (e){location.href = '/Home/Thanks/';});});

Site is gone now, too. Redirects to http://www.azurewebsites.net/SiteUnavailable.htm

Not to be a downer here, but how is Windows supposed to compete with Linux in terms of cost when platforms like the Raspberry Pi cost merely 25 bucks?

Even if they slash license prices by a huge amount, I can't see MS giving them away for single digit prices.

A decade ago, Windows CE had better widget kits and programming environment when compared to Linux. This was especially true for touchscreen interaction.

For example, Zeiss Microscopes control panels from 2006 use Windows CE. I am not sure what the advantage is today. GCC competes well with VS and more people know Qt.

MS can give this away for free as it isn't a market that they own.

> A decade ago, Windows CE had better widget kits and programming environment when compared to Linux. This was especially true for touchscreen interaction.

And PocketPC could do almost everything an iPhone could do about... 5-6 years before the iPhone came out. Windows CE was clearly ahead of its time, but the support from Microsoft was terrible: they kept it low-key, too long.

>And PocketPC could do almost everything an iPhone could do about... 5-6 years before the iPhone came out.

I had a top-of-the-line PocketPC phone for three years. Saying a PocketPC could do almost everything an iPhone could do is like saying that a nail file could do almost everything a Haas CNC machine could do.

Without wanting to start a longer off topic debate: I think you have your analogy upside down. Compared to the iPhone 1 a top-of-the-line PocketPC phone was clearly a CNC Machine. In 2005 I used my PocketPC Phone to SSH into Unix Boxes, write long emails with its slide out keyboard, edited pictures and let people sign documents with its pen and used GPS for turn by turn navigation.

In 2007 Apple released a phone that could only run web-apps without hardware support. At the time this got a big meh from me since it looked like a toy compared to my phone.

I remember someone on the Windows CE team telling me how they wish they had the better build tools like you have on Linux. What was even more interesting was that the Windows CE team actually maintained a Linux distribution because a Windows media player device they are working on, which used Windows CE for the UI and Linux for the rest including the playing of videos.

There is the .NET micro framework. I've never heard of it used in anything serious but it seems like.. uhhh... something Microsoft you could jam into a uC for cheaper than Linux. It doesn't require an MMU which mainline(not uClinux) Linux does... so I guess there is that....

Good luck using .NET micro framework for anything serious. It runs as an interpreted language which is not good when you only have a few kilobytes of memory and a handful of mhz processor speed. There are big problems doing stuff like generating quick signals to power LEDs (like the popular WS2811/WS2812 addressable RGB LEDs) with .NET micro. It's a neat way to use Visual Studio to blink an LED, but much beyond that and it's going to have problems.

Don't need to bother with windows to get .NET though ... Mono runs fine on a Raspberry Pi as is, and its reasonably fast. Just need to download the debian soft float build on an SD card, then run "apt-get install mono-complete".

The microframework doesn't require Windows either. Its designed to be a thin layer that interprets .NET bytecoode on tiny micro-controller. It was an inside joke at an office I worked at for a while. We would threaten other coworkers to port it to our hardware and then port our project to it.

http://www.netmf.com/

Neither in cost nor in flexibility and performance. Windows is a lost case.

'This site is currently not available...'

I think this says it all, joke or otherwise.

Not the most convincing publicity for Azure, is it? This has potential to be a harmless joke turned PR problem.

Seems more like a page that went live before it should have.

Why? The prankster only paid for X bandwidth and ran out of it, most likely.

What's wrong with Windows CE

I wanted to do some Windows CE development as a hobbyist a few years ago (my car stereo runs Windows CE, was hoping to make some apps to monitor OBD parameters) and it was a complete nightmare to try developing against. Maybe things have changed, but it was almost impossible to find tools, resources, or any clear documentation on how to get a development environment setup--this was with a full MSDN subscription too. I think there's a very good reason Windows CE was chucked out in favor of a new OS for their big phone push.

I'm still doing Windows CE 6.0 development on Motorola Business Handhelds. Sadly MS abandoned Windows CE (.net CF) from their IDEs since VS 2008.

WP7 was CE based and was fine to dev with. It's not really the same as the CE you would know though. WP8 is based on NT/Windows 8.

Yeah my comment was a sarcastic rhetorical one :)

But you've done a good job of highlighting why I was being sarcastic.

The licensing?

If you've got an MSDN ultimate it's very easy to get going. If you don't, then it's quite hard, compared to say using the TinyCLR on the .Net Fez things [1] which are easy and by comparison designed to be fun.

[1] https://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/product/297

Since NT runs on ARM these days I would guess this is not Windows CE.

First thing I thought of was Dreamcast when I thought embedded Windows ...

Weirdly didn't the Dreamcast not have any OS on it? It relied on the OS being on the game disk, the cleverly designed normal CD-ROM run at half speed for double density (or something of that nature).

Hmm, there had to be something, cause it ran without a disc. More menus then the PS2. Plus it says powered by windows CE right on the front.

Maybe it was the Dreamcast equivalent of the BIOS before the OS was loaded from the disc? I know that I have machines that say powered by Windows XP that really aren't! :-)

April fools?

Based on what the page says nothing seems like a joke to me.

Anddddddd site is down

This is an April's Fools joke right? The last thing we need is a repeat of the XP on ATMs catastrophe 10 years from now.

because what the world needs is a coffee mug that can blue screen?

Most of the places where embedded linux is used X isn't even really appropriate. Why would you use windows for things that don't even have screens?

Microsoft would have to be asleep at the wheel if they hadn't at some point had a few engineers get a BSD libc and userland running on the NT kernel.

Just because Microsoft won't sell you the NT kernel without a GUI on top doesn't mean that NT kernel is forever welded to a GUI.

It's already here. Server Core is the NT OS without a GUI.

Also, there's been a few implementations of a full UNIX subsystem on Windows. Intermix and Services For UNIX come to mind. Also check out Colinux if it's still alive.