Hi, remember me? Been a LONG while since I've posted anything, I know (like July). No good news to report until now...

Seems like Sean Liming's kept himself busy - head up to his Tools page, and towards the bottom, you'll see a link to a new tool called SLDDiff. For those of you who have his latest XPE book, the Windows XP Embedded Supplemental Toolkit, this will look familiar - it's a lot like SLXDiff, but it compares SLD's.

I'll confess that I was the impetus here - I was looking for a way to find differences in 30+Mb SLD's (like our monthly rollup SLD's) and had nothing. I hacked together an XSLT that would pull the pertinent data out of the SLD, sort it, and dump it to a text file. Do that on two different SLD's, then run the text file output through WinDiff (or suitable differencing engine), and you've got a really terrible way to figure out what changed. Sean took that idea, wrapped it in a neat interface, and came up with a tool I use when necessary.

As for the latest set updates, they're on their way - the desktop versions should be on the OEM Secure Site RSN (Real Soon Now), and the component updates are on their way as well. The only thing that you won't find in the component updates is the DX9 update for XPE SP1. XPE SP1 shipped with DX 8 - we do have a DX9 component for XPE SP1, but since I didn't have that installed when I ran the updates, I didn't pick it up. It will be out in November.

One other piece of good news is that we're now using an automated tool for generating updates for XPE - it does everything we used to do over 1-2 days in about 15 minutes, integrates into the existing build process for XP Pro updates, and cuts down on our test time. We're not pushing so hard anymore to get fixes developed and tested, and can take some time to implement more test automation as well. Our hope is to code ourselves out of jobs, but not until we speed up the release process... :-)