State of The RTOS Report
The recent report on RTOS capabilities of VxWorks, WinCE 5.0, MontaVista Linux 2.1 is a nice comparison of these popular platforms. For WinCE 5.0 in particular, it was stated that Platform Builder – the choice for creating BSP is not reliable. I don’t know what led the authors to this conclusion, but I disagree with this. It may be diffcult to find out a mistake by looking and output windows error messages, but PB is quite stable (though somewhat slow at times) and I have used it extensively for quite some time now and I don’t think of a better environment to get started. In addition it also enables you to build entirely using command-line if you wish. So GUI/CLI is a matter of choice.
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Re PB:
First of all disclaimer: my experience is limited by Win CE 5.0. I am a software engineer with 15+ years of experience in the embedded/real-time
I have to agree that PB is NOT stable. Build environment is very different from plain and simple makefile. I have no idea why MS decided to get rid of UNIX make, but the result is not even average. For example, try manually remove a couple of lib/dll files from the compilation results folder. There is a fair chance that no rebuild will save you.
Yours “though somewhat slow at times” is severe underestimation. Partial build of (Build and Sysgen in WinCE 5.0) small project takes 10-15 minutes. I never tried full rebuild of the OS (public and private source code), but the guy whose kind services we used to help us with the project recommended to avoid this, because it can take literally hours.
The worst problem though is lack of community support. When i look for a problem in Google/Yahoo/MSN I get very small number of search results. I did not find any really active mailing list/message board, leave alone IRC chat rooms. Comparing to eCOS/Linux Win CE looks like a dead project.
My opinion is that Win CE is good for large companies, like Nokia or Palm or HP which have resources to hire professionals directly from MS or get high quality support from MS.
If you consider using WinCE in your project start from good course. Learning curve in WinCE is steeper than in Linux.