Is it possible to write a windows based appliance?

Question

The open source community is producing tons of software appliances because they are able to distribute the OS, essentially for free. So you can quite easily download a virtual image of an application and have it running in minutes without the need to configure and setup. This is a great advantage for cutting down setup and configuration costs and for providing clients with demo software.

It's even better for appliances as oss based applications can easily adapt the OS to the limited resources of the embedded device while this is not possible of Windows, e.g. getting rid of the GUI interface, removing unnecessary code form the kernel, etc.

Can one do something similar with windows? If so, how?

Answer 1

Check out Windows Embedded; It does some of the things you mention (e.g. letting you tailor what is included, omitting the GUI, etc)

Answer 2

Have a look at the .NET Micro Framework - it has a memory footprint of only 300kb and is very lean. It can run either with or without an OS.

• A memory footprint of about 300 KB; for comparison, the next smallest .NET implementation, the .NET Compact Framework running on Windows CE, needs about 12 MB
• Can run directly "on the metal" without an operating system; running on an OS is also possible
• Supports common embedded peripherals and interconnects, including flash memory, EEPROM, GPIO, I2C, SPI, USB
• Optimized for energy-efficiency in battery-powered devices
• Does not require a memory management unit
• Provides multithreading support even when running on single-threaded operating systems
• A hardware abstraction layer allows porting to additional architectures
• A managed device driver model allows drivers for many devices to be written in C#
• Execution constraints to catch device lockups and crashes
• Transparent support for storing objects in non-volatile memory

Answer 3

It's possible to do, but not to tailor as much. Windows Embedded takes 40MB, Embedded Linux can require (much) less than 10MB, depending on what you want/need, and you can cut it further, or build it out further in a different direction, if you need to, given the necessary resources of skill/time/etc.