FP2007: What is it?

I liked that straightforward question posted in the newsgroup.

In fact, FP2007 - Feature Pack 2007 - is a nice addition to the SP2 release of XP Embedded tools. It does have some new features that were never rolled out as QFEs for SP1.

More info on the Pack can be found on the product team blog.
The entire XPe documentation tree has been moved to FP2007.

FP2007 is free for XPe SP2 Toolkit owners.
Non-eval version is out there on Extranet website of Microsoft (ECE). Used to be available on OEM Secure Website that was unfortunately deprecated by Microsoft.

The best thing I loved about FP2007 is the stability of the toolkit. I can finally enjoy working with XPProEmulation and other huge projects and the development tools are not crashing. I have checked - it only required to change a few lines of VB script code that runs within TD (Target Designer) to fix the VB memory related issues while loading a huge number of components.
However, there are still some bugs in FP2007 about the toolkit. For instance, it doesn't like setting big pagefile on some ACPI HAL components. Please refer to this thread for more info posted on that bug.

AutoPlay without Explorer

I am filing this not as a tip but rather as an encouraging info. Unfortunately, I cannot reveal any technical details of my implementations here at this stage of the project (done for a customer) but more to show up soon, I hope.

It has been a problem for quite some time to get some of the Explorer-only features working on XPe without Explorer shell. Myself I had a negative post to the newsgroup on the subject.
The real challenge appears there not when you remove the Explorer.exe from the image but when you stop launching Explorer as shell.

Removing Explorer gives you a lot:
- Explorer is in general a big security hole.
- It is hard to get rid of all unwanted pieces of the Explorer.
- Explorer is not for embedded (it is not "embedded" type of application and have never been really componentized).
- Explorer increases your image footprint. Explorer dependencies are awfully big.
- Explorer implements only 2 foot UI and it may be very inconsistent to your own applications GUI.
- so on.

Anyway, I finally managed to develop my own shell that implements missing pieces that were only working with Explorer Shell so far. Someday I will post what are the missing features among which is the AutoPlay. But the important message now is that AutoPlay can be working without Explorer shell running in background. You just have to do some hacking and coding within your own shell app.

Another good news is that I got the same shell app up and running on Vista (with some mods though) where I stripped out Explorer components.

XPeTools component update

Thanks to Jim, a documentation bug was discovered in the DependencyExplorer component.
I now had some time to go over that bug and fix it in the new version of the component.
I uploaded the updated package of XPeTools on www.xpefiles.com. Updated package also includes some bug fixing for XPProEmulation component in UI and script areas. From UI I have removed the leftover Active button, assigned name to the Group filters to remove the confusion caused by the undocumented exclusion filter, fixed other minor UI issues.

XPe boot-wish-list

To continue my post about MBR problems.

I believe XPe documentation doesn't describe this topic in the details it should have to. In some places in the documentation they assume you've got XP Pro running on the device. Which means you've already properly partitioned and formatted the local storage to boot from using XP Pro Setup.
Below is my personal wish-list about what should be included in the next Service Pack for XPe if Microsoft will release one:
- Create one tool (better Win32 app that we can launch from WinPE, XP Pro or any other flavor of XP and nowadays Vista) that will properly partition local storage on target device. After all, XP Pro Setup does that *much* better and more reliable then any tools from XPE toolkit.

- Provide more detail troubleshooting section in the documentation that will cover as many failed case as possible - from broken MBR to boot sector, from changing timeout of boot.ini to debug parameters for KD.

- There should be documentation section (part of XPe docs!!) that explain how BIOS loads the MBR, info about MBR structure, boot sector, boot sequence of XP, loader (how it gets loaded by bootsector) and etc. Ideally they should include info about all the fields of MS version of MBR and boot sectors. After all, most of this info is out there in MS KB articles (but hard to search) and on the Web.

- Provide a set of tools (my best wish is to have one complex command line tool with a bunch of switches like myu favorites MbrFix and NirCmd) that will do fixing for all the parts that may get broken - from MBR to bootsectors (all types!) and partition setup (I secretly don't get why we should be using 3rd party tools like MbrFix, for instance?).

I will probably update this list once in a while when my memory flashes out with more ideas I've been having.

XPe Lifecycle

I thought Microsoft has covered the life cycles for their products well enough but questions about it keep coming. A recent thread in the newsgroup is a good example.

Very details answer to this was given out by the Product Team in their blog - XP Embedded Lifecycle Support.

Some more helpful links on the subject.

Life cycle of Service Packs for Microsoft Embedded products is detailed here.
Here is what it says about Windows Embedded:
Product Name General Availability Date Service Pack Support Retired Notes
Windows XP Embedded Service Pack 0 (RTM) 30-Jan-2002 22-Oct-2004
Windows XP Embedded Service Pack 1 22-Oct-2002 10-Apr-2007
Windows XP Embedded Service Pack 2 18-Jan-2005 Not Applicable
See Note Support ends either 12 months after the next service pack releases or at the end of the product's support lifecycle, whichever comes first. Visit the Lifecycle page to find the support timelines for your particular product.

Microsoft Support Lifecycle page for Windows XP Embedded.

According to Shayna Begun [MS], Feature Pack is not the same as a Service Pack - Feature Pack 2007 did not reset the support lifecyle for XPe. Regarding the next version of the product, it would be the next version of the Embedded product, so Vista would not pertain here.
Andy Allred [MS] confirmed that as well here. (you can find the whole thread here)

Just thought I'd gather all the related info in one place.

XPProEmulation update: "ghost" Kenel-FP1 and CompactPCI stack

Thanks to Jimt, a couple of issues were found, identified and fixed in the XPProEmulation image.

The main issue was that a weird "Kenel-FP1" component was appearing in TD during dependency check for those who used XPProEmulation project for FP2007. The strangest thing was that myself I couldn't reproduce the issue, although I did see that component mentioned in the SLX when I did a binary unicode search in the file.

After some investigation it appeared that most likely it was me who played too much with CTP1 and CTP2 versions of FP2007 and accidentally brought in and left the R3300 version of the "1394 Kernel Debugger Support Library" component that was dependent on the "ghost" Kenel-FP1 component. Well, truly speaking, it is the TD auto-upgrader who couldn't really downgrade that component when I went from CTPx to RTM of FP2007, but obviously I am responsible for any bug in XPProEmulation anyway :-)

Anyway, I've fixed the Kenel-FP1 issue and uploaded the updated version of the SLX on www.xpefiles.com.

Long time ago I had to make a decision to include CompactPCI stack solely due to the reason that the "CompactPCI Hot Swap Support" is a "software" component and I wanted to include it into the project. This component, however, requires some hardware related stuff ("Generic CompactPCI Chassis" and "Generic CompactPCI CPU board" components) and I resolved them to minimize the effort and build errors for the devs who're going to mess around the XPProEmulation.
Quite frankly, so far I haven't seen a need for the CompactPCI stack being included so I am changing my mind now and moving that stack out the project. The latest updated SLX on xpefiles.com has all three components disabled.
The readme.txt, updated with the project, reflects all the changes.

My own XPe newsgroup posts database

I got to mention this here. I've been posting to Microsoft XPe newsgroup for quite a while as KM and always been saving all my posts (Outlook Express archive). The fact is that for the moment (March 20, 2007) I've got 6523 messages in that archived folder! Not bad, huh? :-)

I am thinking (read: planning) on exposing that database of "answers in XPe area" to the public some day. Perhaps, I will "somehow" link it to this blog. What's really needed is - Search engine! Otherwise it is going to be useless to see my bad english reading those numberless posts.

Starting XPe tips&tricks

I am starting new type of posting: XPe Tips. Will post here whatever tips and tricks we come up with while posting to microsoft public XPe newsgroup.

The first and ever trick - please read and search the online product documentation. You will learn that it often has answers to most of your questions.

XPe useful links

I will be doing this blog primarily focusing on Microsoft product reviews, tip&tricks and development stuff.

Let me start from my favor ties: Windows XP Embedded and Windows Embedded CE.

Some useful links for XP Embedded product:

Latest XP Embedded online documentation

XP Embedded public newsgroup google archive

XP Embedded Microsoft Forum

Windows XP Embedded Tips

Microsoft OEM Secure website

XP Embedded public newsgroup MSCE archive

Windows XP Embedded Team Blog

XPe 3rd party components