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Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2

blogs.windows.com

141–150 of 173 posts

Re: Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2

#141
I've got an Intel Galilleo that Microsoft sent me which I was hoping to use to play with the embedded windows platform, but it was so locked down, all you could do was write arduino sketches, now they release their Windows for IoT and it only works on Raspberry Pi 2?

I've got beaglebones and RPis that I'd love to give Windows 10 a play on, but they've shot themselves in the foot by supporting such a small part of the hardware market.

I've been a microsoft fan for a long time, I have a Windows 10 laptop, Windows Phone, and want to at least give them a try for IoT (though I have no problem with my linux installs), but I think they've lost me on this one.

Who thought they could come into a market which is well served by the linux community, offer very little if anything compared to what is already available, make it difficult to install, have it work on a small subset of hardware, and make it a success.

I don't understand Microsoft's strategy here at all!

Re: Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2

#142
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do too, but I also use Qt Creator and Eclipse for writing C++ on RTOSes and I really don't think VS is anything special. I will agree with you about the documentation, with few exceptions MS documentation is some of the best written. But this is far from something that should prevent a platform swap. The piss poor code editing tools in VC++ irk me more than anything, I have to say that I feel like it's the worst of…

I'll disagree there. After spending hours trying to make sense of the Win32 API documentation in msdn. Often failing to make sense of it, finding the answer in Raymond Chen blog a long with a few lines pointing out that the msdn documentation doesn't cover some important cases/caveats.

Most all Win32 stuff works just fine. It is documented better than _any_ one Linux module/layer. There is no comparison. But these days I don't even need to bother with Win32, .NET handles 99.9% of what I need to do. Then again I am not a driver developer.

Re: Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2

#143
post #97
post #3

When they released this a couple of months ago I was pretty excited to try it out. I think the barrier to installation is a bit high. First install Windows 10, then custom install of VS, install IoT Templates, then about 30 more steps before you get the image to flash on your SD. How about a link to the image I can blast on the SD and kick the tires without a couple hours of downloading and installing prerequisites?

Very funny considering the uneasiness people have towards "putting Linux on a computer". For the Raspberry Pi, the reality is completely reversed as NOOBS is the absolute easiest, most convenient way to put any OS on any computer ever. I really don't understand people who want this, with closed source software the learning stops at some point, you can't learn everything about your Windows-Pi even though it was create…

Having worked in both Linux and Windows shops, yes, there are people that would readily use Windows on a π, because that's what they know best. Could they use Linux? Yeah, probably, they're smart people. However, that's a bunch of extra steps when you really just want to get things working and hack around on some code.

At some point they might get curious and try Linux on it as well, but I'm all for whatever makes it easier for someone to get into trying something new without a lot of burden. For some people that means using Windows so they can use the platform and tooling they're most familiar with (Visual Studio and .net).

Yes, there's mono and such, but even that still brings its own complexity when you actually consider what else it takes to get set up and going for someone that's never used Linux before (or outside of some courses in college).

It's like wanting to build furniture, but then told you should plant a tree, wait for that tree to grow, chop it down, cut it up for wood, then you can start building some furniture. Most people would give up long before actually making any furniture in that case.

Re: Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have quite regularly, but I'm just as comfortable in that of Eclipse, Qt Creator, gdb, or even binary debuggers like IDA's or OllyDbg for reverse engineering. I don't see it as a major advantage over any other platform. It's a simple GUI debugger, nothing fancy. Am I missing something?

You lost me at Eclipse being decent...

You got that right!

The Eclipse comment got me to stop here…signup, and write.

I have been a Wintel developer for 25 years. I make a modest 6-figure income writing C#/MSSQL apps (after years of (Clipper, C, C++ and Delphi) that run large businesses. I mainly write multi-threaded server apps (most from the ground up, not WCF/SOAP) but I do still venture into the GUI work and even WPF/MVVM these days. I prefer MSSQL over Oracle any day, no comparison for 99% of what is needed out there. I love Hyper-V and VMWare (even when the Linux-lineage rears its head). My server in the basement is loaded with 140TB of very redundant storage. So, not the overage scrip kiddie who picked up this computer stuff last year.

I completely gave up on Linux and any OpenSource development tools a few years ago, my personality and mind (of lack of) just couldn’t deal with it. It is completely frustrating to deal with almost-no-docs, partial thoughts of most users, buzzwords, short-hand, almost no attention to detail, and often from guys living in mom's basement, that have no need to generate output and earn a paycheck.

I know that sounds harsh, but it is based on my experience with software development. I tried to cope with the Linux ecosystem for 10 years, it had to stop.

It does, (or did) take days to install the completely unfocused IDE Eclipse and the Android SDK (Java itself to a lesser degree). People (I will call them “enthusiasts”) with lots of time, and little experience writing maintainable software, might enjoy the challenge - but I called it hell – I could give endless examples of zero-docs or absolutely wrong examples, docs and walk-throughs. Almost every doc I ever found on setting up Linux-ish (servers) or Android dev environments, etc. was completely full of errors, and the user community seemed to love their walk through their fields of mines. And I believe that is because the authors/users can get away it - production and earning is not key, playing and killing time seems to be the focus. This is fine I guess, but not for me. I must provide value to my customers/employers and write software that is maintainable. MS and VS allow me to do this with relative ease. MS has its faults, and I can list bugs in Windows that may never be fixed.

Look at the Storage Spaces mess. Look at awesome ZFS (I mean that) – and only 1 PhD required to implement and properly maintain it under Linux, with storage beyond a minimal size. Look at the nightmare of Linux, storage controllers, trying to figure out what drive has what serial #, and is attached to what port, CLI and Gerp Hell. I bet FreeNAS still forces someone into spending a day to get all the apps required to pipe and redirect and Grep 20 apps, just right (oops the doc was wrong again) to find the one bad drive and drive serial#. MS with all its faults, smiles at this kind of mess. They usually improve on this, although I can’t say Storage Spaces is an example of this.

It is my strong opinion (but I haven’t had the pleasure in doing) that all one needs to do to support my point, is take a group of average to above-average users/people and give them the mission of getting a dev environment setup to take some input from a user, open a socket and send that data somewhere. All Linux attempts will fail (with hostile screaming involved), most MS VS C# attempts will succeed (with minimal cursing). It really is that simple to demonstrate. One can play around with horrible docs and horrible tools or one can express their thoughts and solutions and earn a paycheck (if you're into that kind of thing). And for real comedy, ask those same test subject to setup an SMB server, in Linux and in Windows. I think you get my point, if you are not the 1 in 1000 Linux users that knows how to do that.

Nothing makes me happier than Win10 IoT Core on Raspberry. I like Arduino, I use it when I have/need to, Netduino was OK but hit its limits, but I now, in 2015, I have a rock-solid IDE and C# at my fingertips, and Raspberry and Minnowboard, my higher-level projects will now be a breeze to implement. I am sure I will experience some pain but MS always gets it together for the developers. We are all of course doing different things for different reasons. I like to build home automation solutions for myself and friends (not commercially). So my Win10 IoT Core vs. Linux views come from that limited slant.

I am not wanting to argue, that happens everywhere, I simply wanted to share my point of view as I remember my Eclipse Android SDK nightmares of a few years ago. We can completely disagree on some or all of this and still enjoy the comments on this thread. I smile and laughed at some of the comments here. Fun stuff. Good luck.

Re: Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2

#145
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very funny considering the uneasiness people have towards "putting Linux on a computer". For the Raspberry Pi, the reality is completely reversed as NOOBS is the absolute easiest, most convenient way to put any OS on any computer ever. I really don't understand people who want this, with closed source software the learning stops at some point, you can't learn everything about your Windows-Pi even though it was create…

Having worked in both Linux and Windows shops, yes, there are people that would readily use Windows on a π, because that's what they know best. Could they use Linux? Yeah, probably, they're smart people. However, that's a bunch of extra steps when you really just want to get things working and hack around on some code. At some point they might get curious and try Linux on it as well, but I'm all for whatever makes it…

I also suspect, without having tried Win10 IoT, that the interface is more polished, and building apps are simpler. You don't have the same freedom, but as long as the developers can do what they like, it's more than enough.

Re: Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2

#147
post #113
post #3

When they released this a couple of months ago I was pretty excited to try it out. I think the barrier to installation is a bit high. First install Windows 10, then custom install of VS, install IoT Templates, then about 30 more steps before you get the image to flash on your SD. How about a link to the image I can blast on the SD and kick the tires without a couple hours of downloading and installing prerequisites?

Business as usual for Microsoft. There must be something about their business model I'm not getting. Going to microsoft.com with the intent of buying Windows to install it on a naked PC or in a VM on OSX, I have yet to identify an option that allows me to: 1) buy a license, 2) download an ISO image. The closest solution I've seen is to download some exe file that presupposes that I have Windows installed somewhere so…

"Why? Do they not want my business? Is it really so horrible to sell their product to someone who wants to run their OS under VMWare?"

Not really, they want the business of IT departments of medium/large companies, running full Windows stacks (Windows Enterprise, Office, Windows Server, MS Sql Server, Exchange), which buy licenses by the dozen (at least) through their purchasing department.

It's how they make(a lot of) money.

Re: Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2

#148
post #97
post #3

When they released this a couple of months ago I was pretty excited to try it out. I think the barrier to installation is a bit high. First install Windows 10, then custom install of VS, install IoT Templates, then about 30 more steps before you get the image to flash on your SD. How about a link to the image I can blast on the SD and kick the tires without a couple hours of downloading and installing prerequisites?

Very funny considering the uneasiness people have towards "putting Linux on a computer". For the Raspberry Pi, the reality is completely reversed as NOOBS is the absolute easiest, most convenient way to put any OS on any computer ever. I really don't understand people who want this, with closed source software the learning stops at some point, you can't learn everything about your Windows-Pi even though it was create…

I tried the technical preview of IoT core and was underwhelmed. The mouse didn't even work! It jumped around erratically making it unusable.

My experience with Linux on the Pi is that it just works out of the box. Simple things that you need to install a driver for on Windows are plug and play on Linux [0].

I installed the desktop Windows 10 preview just to flash the SD card. Although I read in the Mag Pi [1] that there is a Python script [2] to convert the image to a normal format.

I'm a big fan of C# and I'm a professional .NET developer. It's my go to stack. Yet, I believe that the best way to use a Raspberry Pi is with Python on Linux.

[0] https://unop.uk/dev/raspberry-pi-electricity-monitor

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/issues/34/

[2] https://github.com/t0x0/random

Re: Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2

#149
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very funny considering the uneasiness people have towards "putting Linux on a computer". For the Raspberry Pi, the reality is completely reversed as NOOBS is the absolute easiest, most convenient way to put any OS on any computer ever. I really don't understand people who want this, with closed source software the learning stops at some point, you can't learn everything about your Windows-Pi even though it was create…

I tried the technical preview of IoT core and was underwhelmed. The mouse didn't even work! It jumped around erratically making it unusable. My experience with Linux on the Pi is that it just works out of the box. Simple things that you need to install a driver for on Windows are plug and play on Linux [0]. I installed the desktop Windows 10 preview just to flash the SD card. Although I read in the Mag Pi [1] that th…

It's not meant to be a desktop. It meant to be be an embedded system with no mouse or keyboard and maybe a touchscreen.

Re: Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2

#150
post #4

I'm curious as to the mention of a "Web Control" and how long we have to wait until we can use DirectX for graphics, seeing as I've been trying to use Pis for digital signage[1] for a while with varying results (we've since started using cheap Android boxes with great results, but I wish I had more choices). [1]: https://github.com/sapo/digital-signage-client

What Android digital signage client are you using?

This one: https://github.com/sapo/android-signage-client

(of course we rolled our own :))

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