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.