Optimizing What’s Under the Hood

REDMOND, Wash. — June 18, 2010 — For Ashwin Kulkarni there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to a product that many people use. When he joined the Windows Embedded team two years ago, one of the most impactful perspectives he gained was on the sheer number of devices that have an operating system in them.

Having such a wide variety of devices enabled by the Windows Embedded platform is what makes work interesting for Ashwin, senior product manager, and the Windows Embedded developer community. But with so many devices out in the marketplace, an effective means for measuring and optimizing performance also becomes a necessity.

To ensure devices are running their best, the Windows Performance Analysis (WPA) Toolkit offers developers a powerful way to measure and diagnose performance issues across all devices running Windows Embedded Standard 7 or Windows Embedded Enterprise.

“The value is for them to understand how they can tune the performance of the device to be faster and better. This helps them optimize their OS image to the device performance they need and get the most out of it,” Ashwin said.

Many times developers must manually equip the operating system and programs with performance metrics, and write tools to collect and analyze these metrics. With the WPA Toolkit, they can leverage the power of Windows for Windows Embedded devices. 

The WPA Toolkit was originally used on the Windows 7 core base. Given the familiarity with Windows 7, developers can now use the same Windows 7 tools on Windows Embedded Enterprise and Windows Embedded Standard 7, such as the WPA Toolkit.

There are two important benefits to this connection:

  • The skills honed while working on Windows 7 can be applied to Windows Embedded Standard 7 or Windows Embedded Enterprise.

  • Developers can take advantage of how the Windows team has optimized Windows 7 and utilize this to enhance their Windows Embedded device. 

Further extending value, the WPA Toolkit also gives developers a means to measure how a device performs better when compared with other devices in the market. This in turn helps original equipment manufacturers provide better guidance to customers on how one device is better than others.

As with all experiences, knowledge brings power, and that is a fundamental part of what Ashwin appreciates about tools like the WPA Toolkit and the developer community’s influence. “Having developers understand what the product does is really important for Windows Embedded adoption across our breadth of device categories,” he said.

The WPA Toolkit comes as part of the Windows 7 SDK. For more information on the WPA Toolkit, you can review the official measuring performance white paper.

Related Posts