News and Views of a Technical Nomad

Feb

28

Those of us who thought that VIA Motherboards and Chipsets were not capable of running high-end Windows operating systems will have to think again!

VIA have released the CN896 chipset which has been certified by Microsoft as Vista-ready.

As the press-release says: The VIA CN896 chipset features the VIA Chrome9™ HC integrated graphics processor (IGP) featuring a DirectX® 9.0 3D accelerator for high performance and a 2D accelerator for productivity applications.

The full press release can be found here.

So far I have shied away from Vista, I installed it on a 2 year old Toshiba Laptop over Christmas and found it somewhat slow which was probably the result of running it on slightly old technology so I reinstalled XP Professional which was a lot faster. At the moment, I do not see a pressing need to upgrade any of my PCs.

That said, I am pretty excited by a Mini-ITX board that has DirectX 3D graphics!

Feb

28

Roland Groeneveld, the founder of Mini-ITX specialist supplier Logic Supply, wrote a good background article on Mini-ITX in Embedded Computing which was published in WindowsforDevices.com in May last year.

In it, he summarises the history, evolution and possible future of the Mini-ITX.

The article can be found here.

Feb

28

The Mini-ITX Cluster

February 28, 2007 | 1 Comment

Mini-ITX.com has an article on Aikaboot’s new Mini-ITX Cluster which is a Linux based cluster of Mini-ITX motherboards all of which are hot-swappable. The cluster sits in 4U rack and uses 1.5GHz C7 VIA CPU and SATA external RAID for storage. The case can take up to 8 modules.

Being a bit of a tech geek, I have long had thoughts of setting up my own rack of PCs as opposed to having them sit on the floor or the shelf; so this sort of thing looks very cool!

Feb

28

CNet has a good article commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Mini-ITX board with pictures of some wacky mods using the MIini-ITX

Feb

26

Channel Register has an interesting report on the Mono Project, which is backed by Novell, which apparently allows Visual Basic.NET code to run on Linux.

What is available right now is a preview in Mono version 1.2.3 .

The Mono Project can be found here.

Feb

21

According to this article in WindowsforDevices.com, Microsoft have released a new Community Technology Preview for Windows XP Embedded SP2 which contains a lot of new features relating to .NET Framework 3.0 and Vista.

I will admit that I am very interested in the idea of Windows XP Embedded; not so much because I want to build small computers, although I do; but because of the fact that XP Embedded allows one to totally customise a Windows “build” in terms of which components it actually contains so that one can create a version of XP that is totally unique and customised and only contains the features that one needs for the task in hand rather than “every” feature; which has obvious implications for running windows from a CF Disk or a very small hard-drive and obviouslu such a version of Windows would use a lot less memory, boot a lot faster and probably run a lot quicker.

The only problem with that scenario is that XP Embedded is not cheap and does not, currently, come as part of MSDN so the only option one has is to play with a trial version and then spend a thousand dollars on a license.

There are some alternatives, such as nLite, which allow one to “streamline” Windows by removing components before creating an image on a DVD or CD, but I have not tried them either as I currently do not have a spare PC to play with.

Feb

21

SearchWebServices.com have published a useful article on recent and upcoming changes to Visual Studio in the wake of the release of .NET Framework 3.0 and how you can add the ability to build web services to Visual Studio 2005.

I must admit that I have not installed .NET Framework 3.0 or any recent updates from Microsoft myself, part of the reason is that I have been working away and my MSDN subscription gets delivered to Canada so it will all be waiting for me when I get home and part of the reason is that I have a lot of stuff on my plate at the moment, such as this blog site and continuing changes to ordersofbattle.com .

That said, I am a big fan of Web Services; they are very flexible and allow developers to integrate systems together in a very loosly coupled way. I have designed and developed quite a few web services in Siebel 7.5 and the fact that they do not require a queuing system such as MQ or MSMQ is a definite plus in some situations.

At some point soon, I will definitely upgrade and start using some of the new functionality in .NET 3.0 .

Feb

21

Robert Kuo, the inventor of the Mini-ITX board is interviewed at VIA Arena here

Feb

19

The first Mini-ITX Reference Design from 2001. 

Click here for the Press Release from VIA.

A brief history of the VIA Mini-ITX form-factor motherboard and associated CPU technology can be found here

Feb

15

According to EETimes, Microsoft has released an SDK for its .NET Micro Framework which is aimed at developers of small embedded devices. MS has until recently used the Framework internally but announced last year that it would make the Framework available.

The Framework is aimed at developers who do not need to use MS XP Embedded or CE. Developers can develop using a C# and a cut down version of the original .NET Framework using Visual Studio 2005. Applications can run in a few hundred Kb of RAM.

CE.NET is also a cut-down version of .NET Framework that can be developed in Visual Studio using an emulator to test the application.

The differences betrween the CE .NET Framework and the new .NET Micro Framework are discussed in a blog written by MS engineer Mike Hall that can be found here .

More information on the .NET Micro Framework can be found here, as well as the download page for the SDK. 

More information on CE Development can be found here.

On a personal note, I am pretty interested in Embedded Windows and building applications for small hand-held devices. In the days when I had a Windows CE PDA, I had some fun building a small .NET Application for CE that could query a SQL Server database running on a server via WiFi! It’s something I would like to get more exposure to.

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