Thursday, October 20, 2005

October Updates, and news

Well, part of the October updates are on the OEM Secure Site - the ones for use with the (inaccurately named) Desktop QFE Installer Tool have been posted. I'm looking into why the component updates aren't there - they were actually released by me the day after the desktop updates.

A few notes about these persistent delays - in the past, the delays have been due to engineering delays. We wait until the second Tuesday (when the Pro updates are public) to start our componentization process. Now, however, we're actually done with the componentization and testing a week before everything is ready for release - that week gives us time to actually do the release of the componentized updates. The release process has changed as well - we're releasing via CD direct to the Authorized Resellers, so you can actually order the update CD from the company from which you get your XPE tools and device licenses. Everything up to the burning of the CD I have some control over - after the CD is burned, it's a black box to me.

So, while from my POV we're simultaneously releasing Embedded updates with the Pro updates, the process of getting them onto the OEM Secure Site is still a time consuming process, and means that you still see a week delay. I'm doing everything I can to decrease that time to be as small as possible.

One other note - October included an update for DirectX 9 for both SP1 and SP2(MS05-050, KB904706). XPE SP1 did not ship with DX9, so there won't be a componentized version of the DX9 update for XPE SP1 in the package that gets released. We did ship a DX9 component for XPE SP1 as a separate feature update - I plan to have an update for that feature in December. It will be setup so it won't install on your XPE SP1 DB unless you have the DX9 feature added - let me know if this is important to you by commenting here.

And one final note - you'll want to keep visiting both this blog and the Embedded Team blog in the coming weeks. We're working on something pretty cool that we should have figured out years ago, and I think you'll want to see it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

jon, quick question - the component update for october is a single 53 MB file with .img extension. In the past these have been .exe files that autoupdate the database. What do I use to get the .img file to update the database?

Did I miss something, or indeed are the october updates different?

Thanks.