The last two weeks were pretty busy on my side. Just before leaving for IDF 2014 in San-Francisco, I received the notification from Microsoft that I could finally access to their Windows for the Galileo gen1 board. I do love UNIX, do appreciate Linux, but I am a Windows developer and user at the core. I started event-driven and UI programming using the Petzold for Windows 2.0 (I say “Petzold” for Windows programming as I could say “Ritchie & Kernighan” for the C language).

Back from IDF, I gave a try to run Windows on my Galileo board. Overall, the installation is pretty straight forward, and as soon as you have access to a Galileo Gen1, you should be up and running the blinking LED sample in less than one hour. My main issues were to find a micro-SD card that could hold the OS image and to detect the IP address of the board (had the same issues with Linux). At this stage – I just had the time to try the new OS in Arduino mode –, I cannot say anything yet about building a stand-alone Win32 app. What I really loved, is the tight integration with Visual Studio, and the debug capability. This is really cool and a big step ahead for me.