REDMOND, Wash. — In a bid to toughen up Windows CE and make it a more potent player in the embedded market, Microsoft Corp. has unveiled a preview of its latest release-dubbed 2.10-of the downsized operating system.

But even bigger plans are afoot, as Microsoft rushes to ready the next-generation Windows CE 3.0, which will be equipped with support for "hard" real-time applications.

"We've had a lot of interest in our plans for real-time Windows CE 3.0," confirmed Tony Barbagallo, Microsoft's product manager for Windows CE.

Due next year, 3.0 could go a long way toward enhancing CE's embedded credibility. To date, CE has been viewed largely as an OS best suited for handheld PCs and other applications that can get by with the relatively laggard interrupt-response times common to the PC world. But Microsoft has acknowledged that today's release of CE can't deliver the guaranteed, ultra-fast interrupt response times-features known as determinism and low latency-required for heavy-duty "hard" real-time apps.

In implementing hard real-time support, CE 3.0 will add a number of crucial features. These include a prioritization scheme that comprises 32 different priority levels. Microsoft will also add a real-time clock, support for thread-based device drivers, settable device-driver priorities, OS-level timing diagnostics, DLL mechanisms for real-time threads, semaphores and real-time isolation for non-real-time threads.

Aiming to make hay of such battle-hardened features, Microsoft sees CE surging into some new applications areas. "I see three levels of application," Microsoft's Barbagallo said. "There's management and monitoring. Programmable logic controllers are the next level. At the top, you have sensors and high-precision robotics. With what we're going to do with Windows CE, I believe we'll get into that second level-the programmable-logic controllers. I'm not sure we'll make it into the sensors. In fact, a lot of the sensors on the factory floor are not even 32-bit RISC."

While hewing firmly to a planning release of CE 3.0 next year, Microsoft won't provide specifics as to how the effort is progressing. A number of embedded-industry experts believe Microsoft will have its work cut out for it, because adding hard real-time support into an existing software infrastructure is considered challenging. However, Microsoft said it is confident 3.0 will meet its design objectives.

Interestingly, rather than running from its desktop heritage, Microsoft is making use of the fact that CE was originally developed outside of the traditional real-time operating system market.

In practical terms, this is playing out in an unusual series of marketing arrangements in the RTOS arena. On the one hand, Windows CE is competing with many of the traditional RTOSes. At the same time, however, Microsoft is building cooperative arrangements with some of those same RTOS vendors. For example, Microtec Research, which sells the VRTX RTOS, is providing a debugger for CE. Integrated Systems Inc., which makes the pSOS RTOS, is selling support services for CE.

"From our standpoint, we felt that partnering with the likes of ISI and Microtec Research was going to accelerate the adoption of Windows CE, where it was a fit," Microsoft's Barbagallo explained.

Of this double-edged relationship with the RTOS community, Barbagallo said, "That's a great point, which has not been covered well. VRTX and pSOS, as operating systems go, are quite similar. They were built from the ground up as real-time executives and then they added to that capabilities like file systems and networking. But their ultimate core is a real-time executive, so they're well capable of being used to control anti-lock braking systems and control systems."

In contrast, Barbagallo sees CE as an ideal fit in "areas where you need a display, where your memory is not overly constrained. Then there's this gray area in the middle where VRTX and pSOS have moved up the chain with, for example, networking features. Quite honestly, even though we've partnered with those companies we'll compete for that business."

However, Microsoft appears intent on targeting CE directly against two other RTOS competitors: QNX from QNX Software Systems Ltd. and VxWorks from Wind River Systems Inc.

"Those operating systems were built according to much higher level OS principles, above the kernel," claimed Barbagallo. "So there is much, much more overlap between QNX and VxWorks and Windows CE, than there is between pSOS and VRTX and Windows CE."

Barbagallo said that "by definition" Microsoft will be competing much more aggressively against those two RTOSes. "Not because we've got a sales force directed against them or anything," he explained. "I'm talking sheer technical. Just by the technical virtue of the capabilities of the operating systems; they're much closer in scope than Windows CE is compared against VRTX and pSOS."

In the real world, this strategy means that Microsoft appears intent on going after some of the embedded applications that have traditionally belonged to the likes of VxWorks and QNX in areas such as test and instrumentation, printers and networking.

"We're being designed into applications in all three of those spaces, but we're not allowed to talk about it because of confidentiality with the customers," Barbagallo claimed. "We've got at least a design win that I know of in the networking space, and at least a design win in the office-automation space."

Here today
While looking ahead to a harder real-time future, Microsoft this month is touting the impending release of 2.10. The preview version has just hit the Web. Perhaps the most immediately notable feature is the broadened hardware options the OS offers to embedded developers. Specifically, CE 2.10 adds support for several new embedded processors, including Advanced RISC Machines' ARM, Hitachi's SH4 and NEC's VR4300. (The OS continues to support the processors handled by the current release, including a variety of x86, PowerPC, MIPS and SH3 CPUs.)

Microsoft is offering the 2.10 preview release to developers on a set of four CD-ROMs for a cost of $15.00. The preview requires that developers have a copy of Microsoft's Windows CE Embedded Toolkit for Visual C++ 5.0 already installed on their systems.

On the software side of the equation, CE 2.10 supports a flash file system, the ability to handle remote debugging, an instrumented kernel for performance tracking and a task switcher for embedded development. Communications enhancements include IP multicasting and fast infrared connections.