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New Features in Windows CE .NET 4.1

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The following table shows the operating system features that were new for Windows CE .NET 4.1. For more information, see New Features in Windows CE .NET 4.2, New Features in Windows CE .NET 4.0, and New Platform Builder Features in Windows CE .NET 4.0 and 4.1.

Feature Description
x86 BIOS Boot Loader This feature is a boot loader for x86 microprocessors. It allows the OS to boot from an external medium such as a floppy disk, Compact Flash (CF) storage card, or CD-ROM.
CPU Architecture Enhancements The CPU architecture was enhanced with the following functionality:
  • An improved Windows Media Audio decoder and an optimized memcpy function for ARM microprocessors.
  • An optimized memcpy function has been added to enable improved performance on memory intensive operations for ARM-based microprocessors.
New device drivers and device driver updates The following drivers were updated in 4.1:
  • An improved Permedia3 display driver performance for Direct3D applications.
  • An improved audio driver for Hitachi-based systems using the HD64465 companion chip.
  • Support for anti-aliased fonts in the TVIA5000 display driver.
  • An improved high-speed serial port driver.
Device management This feature allows you to install application and software updates without involving the user. It supports polling, download, failure recovery, and status reporting. Device management consists of the device management service, the client, and the Microsoft Systems Management Server device proxy.
File system enhancements File system drivers were enhanced in the following ways:
  • Support for preserving compression file attributes in the RAM file system, which results in improved Internet Explorer performance when caching or downloading files.
  • Performance improvements to the FAT file system related to large file copy and delete operations.
  • Support for memory-mapped file caching, which enables database code to turn on or turn off cache flushes.
File viewers This feature includes the following functionality:
  • The Microsoft Word Viewer, which displays documents created in Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, and Word XP.
  • The Microsoft Image Viewer, which enables the user to control how images are viewed to create a slide show. Images can be sorted, rotated, or zoomed. The timing between slides can be set and a variety of transition effects can be selected.
  • The Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer, which displays presentations created in Microsoft PowerPoint® 97, PowerPoint 2000, and PowerPoint XP.
  • The Microsoft Excel Viewer, which displays documents created in Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, and Excel XP.
  • The Microsoft PDF Viewer, which displays Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
IEEE 1394 This feature's modules include the following new driver: IEEE 1394 serial bus protocol 2 (SBP-2) driver.

The SBP-2 driver provides applications the ability to access block-based mass storage devices, such as hard drives and CD-ROM drives on the IEEE 1394 bus by using the standard file system functions.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows CE This feature now includes support for IPv6 and Kerberos security.
NTLM v2 authentication protocol This feature is implemented as a security package that is accessible through the Security Support Provider Interface (SSPI). NTLM v2 has several enhancements that address security issues and session security requirements for confidentiality, integrity, and 128-bit encryption.
Power Manager This feature now includes the following enhancements:
  • An enhanced Power Control Panel utility.
  • Improved support for the suspend and resume states. PC Card client drivers can stay loaded during suspend and be used as a wake-up source. A network connection can be maintained during suspend.
Speech API (SAPI) This feature is a subset of the Microsoft Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI) version 5.0. SAPI 5.0 is a programming standard for speech recognition and converting text to speech. Speech recognition applications allow a computer to respond to spoken commands. Text-to-speech applications allow a computer to synthesize a voice that speaks words that are in a string or text file.
TCP/IPv6 support This feature is a suite of standard protocols that is the next generation of network layer protocols for the Internet. Using 128-bit addresses, IPv6 provides more IP addresses than its predecessor, IPv4, which uses 32-bit addresses. Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and Windows Media Technologies all support IPv6.
Windows Messenger for Windows CE .NET This feature is a client application that combines real-time voice and text communications with file transfer capability. Windows Messenger is presence-enabled. This means that the users can see who is available online before they try to contact other people and can control their online status, which other people see. The user can also initiate remote assistance, multiplayer games, and other applications using Windows Messenger.

The Windows Messenger client leverages the Communications Service provider, the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) stack, the Real-Time Protocol (RTP) stack, and the MSN Messenger protocol stack.
Windows Sockets (Winsock) 2.2 This feature is fully backwards compatible with Winsock 1.1.

See Also

Changes in Platform Builder | Migrating from Windows CE 3.0 to Windows CE .NET | What's New | New OS Features

Last updated on Wednesday, April 13, 2005

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